It’s bits

We’ve just launched the ability to display bitcoin in “bits” — the smaller, more user-friendly version of bitcoin’s full BTC unit.

Since the dawn of time, a single Bitcoin has been divided into 8 decimal places — into 100,000,000 “Satoshis”. This means that one Satoshi is worth exactly 0.00000001 BTC — not exactly an easy number to deal with.

Recently, a proposal came up to move to “bits”. One bit (or µBTC) is worth 100 satoshis, which means that prices can easily be displayed using two decimal places, as most people are already used to. Another advantage is that bits can be easier to say and understand — for example, $1 USD is currently worth about 0.0017 BTC, or 1,700 bits.

If you want to enable this option on your Coinbase account, simply head over to your Settings page, and change the “Bitcoin units” option to BIT.