Many people say Bitcoin has no real world use to them or anyone else. While we’ve previously debunked that nonsense, we’d like to delve a bit deeper into a particularly interesting use case of Bitcoin that most people never think of: the Bitcoin Unit Of Account.
Bitcoin Unit Of Account
We’ve covered what Unit Of Account is before and if you haven’t read that piece we’d of course recommend it, but for the lazy:
A unit of account is defined as any standard numerical monetary unit of measurement when valuing a good, service or transaction.
For example, we might measure the value of a cup of coffee to be $5 USD. Here the USD is acting as a unit of account to measure the value of the coffee.
- Item Being Measured: Coffee (a good)
- Measurement Unit: US Dollar
- Value: $5 USD
But let’s go deeper…
Time
Let’s think about Time. Around the world the unit of time is most commonly the second. One second is precisely defined by the International System of Units (IS) and is said to be:
The unperturbed ground state hyperfine transition frequency of the cesium
SI Brochure
133 atom, ∆νCs, is 9 192 631 770 Hz
From the second, we can calculate minutes, hours, days etc. Now while you might have no idea what a “hyperfine transition frequency” is, the Important thing to understand here is that this definition never changes.
Tomorrow 1 second will still equal the same 1 second. A hundred years from now, assuming humanity is still around, 1 second will still be the same 1 second as defined above.
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