A Helpful Table

While I was conducting the faucet exercise described in my previous post, Receiving Bitcoins, I realized that I was having some trouble converting between bitcoins and satoshis in my head. I'm usually fairly adept at mental calculation -- although it's an ability that weakens with age -- but calculating the rate between the two basic bitcoin units and a currency left my thought processes swimming.

To fight this problem, I constructed the following conversion table. It shows the equivalence between bitcoins and satoshis, and uses a sample exchange rate of 500 currency units to a bitcoin to estimate a value (the exchange rate as I write this is about $370 to a bitcoin).

Bitcoin	Fiat (e.g. $/€)	Satoshi	NB!
1.0	e.g. 500.00	100,000,000	one bitcoin (BTC)
0.001	0.50	100,000	milli-bitcoin (mBTC)
0.00011	0.055	11000	3 x '000'
0.000 001	0.00 05	100	micro-bitcoin (bit?)
0.000 000 01	0.00 00 05	1	one satoshi

The third row was my 'Aha!' moment. When I realized that 0.00011 bitcoin is the same as 11000 satoshi. I could work out the rest mentally. Call it the rule of three zeroes?