Nonsense. Gold is "expensive" too, but still people buys it and use the denomination it best suits them.
I was one of the "we need exchanges to switch to mBTC" crew when I entered this game and I saw the rise from single digits to $266. Then I realized it's nonsense. People will naturally move to mBTC when it's convenient to price things in mBTC. The recurrent topic "we need to swith to mBTC" (really, search these forums: it's recurrent indeed) it's usually started by newcomers, and the only reasoning behind this demand is "because people will feel the coins are cheaper and they will buy more".
Having gone through that I can now say that it is a sentiment linked to having witnessed the price raising very quickly one or more orders of magnitude. We just cannot accept that people will keep buying these "expensive" coins that grew in price so fast and so much...
But they will. Believe me.
Grandma understands gold, she does not understand bitcoin under any circumstances. My parents does not understand bitcoin, neither does the overwhelming majority of my friends age 25 to 35. Everybody understands gold, they are used to gold.
Now if we want bitcoin to be the digital equivalent to gold we can easily continue the current denominations with my blessings, no point in splitting it. If we want bitcoin to be a currency we must suit it so that people can understand it as something recognisable, and paying for a commodity or service with 0.002507 btc is wery far from recognisable. Neither is investing money in 0.3081 btc seen as attractive. They want recognisable and easy numbers, and they want to feel that they got good value for their bucks, and if so 1000 just seems better than 1, it's pure pricing psychology. I recognise as well as you that ultimately it is nonsense, but most of human nature is pure nonsense.
I can agree that it was premature to go to mbtc when the price was hovering around 100-150 $ though, but the price level where it's at now makes it a lot more difficult for the little guys to consider buying one btc, where he would possibly feel much better with him self if he gets 1000 mbtc for his 800 $. Even though it's nonsense.
