Tonal Bitcoin

The Tonal number system is an alternative to the decimal and SI ("metric") system, which improves usability by allowing for infinite binary division (note that Bitcoin protocol support is still finite). Instead of counting: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, etc... In tonal, you would count: an, de, ti, go, su, by, ra, me, ni, ko, hu, vy, la, po, fy, ton, ton-an, etc... This means you get common binary divisions like one sixteenth (0.0625 in decimal) as a clean number: 0.1 in tonal. The tonal number system, prior to Bitcoin, already defines everyday units of measure including lengths, time, capacity, weight, power, gold/silver coinage, calendar, temperature, and even postage stamps and music.

For more information on the Tonal system in general, please see the book.

While Tonal Bitcoin shares a common blockchain and network with decimal Bitcoin (BTC), it is still also considered to be alternative cryptocurrency ("altcoin") since the units are non-trivially presented differently. That is, merchants who wish to advertise their product to TBC users would be best to advertise an equivalent TBC price alongside the BTC price. Additionally, had a separate block chain ("altchain") been created for TBC, there would have been no advantage to it, and instead enabled a number of abuses and reduced compatibility. Therefore, as an altcoin, TBC demonstrates an ideal way to extend Bitcoin without needing to resort to unnecessary complications.

From the altcoin perspective, TBC is seen to have a number of benefits over more common altchain-based altcoins:

• It shares the same blockchain as BTC, so benefits from the full security and difficulty backing the Bitcoin blockchain.
• TBC is mined together with BTC - unlike ordinary merged mining, you don't get BTC plus TBC, just one or the other at your choice.
• TBC is completely compatible with all Bitcoin addresses: if you send BTC to a TBC client's address, it will automatically get converted and vice-versa.

Tonal Bitcoin is also notably the first altcoin ever, having been created in 2011 January.

Please note, that all numbers of TBC and its divisions/multipliers are written in Tonal, not decimal. This means that instead of counting 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10-- you count: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, , 9, , , , , , 10.

* Tonal Bitcoin and Decimal Bitcoin can be differentiated by the pronunciation of the numbers. "One bitcoin", "two bitcoin", etc is decimal, but "an bitcoin", "de bitcoin" is tonal.

The total number of Tonal Bitcoins ever (analogous to the 21mil BTC in decimal representation) is just over 7.75059 tam-bitcoin.

While all Bitcoin clients will correctly approximate values in decimal bitcoin, actual Tonal compatibility is sparse.

• Bitcoin Knots has native TBC support.
• Patches exist for Bitcoin Core to support TBC (for example, Luke Dashjr's TBC patch for Bitcoin Core master).
• Spesmilo, despite its name, could be configured to display TBC. However, it is no longer maintained and does not work with recent versions of Bitcoin Core.

Given variable 'value' in base units (uBTCents/TBCᵇ), one can guess whether it is properly Decimal Bitcoin or Tonal Bitcoin with the following pseudo-code:

if ( ! ( this % 0x10000 ) )
	Choose Tonal Bitcoin
if ( ! ( this % 1000000 ) )
	Choose Decimal Bitcoin
if ( ! ( this % 0x100 ) )
	Choose Tonal Bitcoin

import math

def formatBTC(n, addSign = False):
	s = "%0.2f BTC" % (math.ceil(n * 100) / 100.,)
	if addSign and n >= 0:
		s = "+" + s
	return s

def Bitcoin2BTC(n):
	return n / 100000000.

toTonalDict = dict(((57, u'\ue9d9'), (65, u'\ue9da'), (66, u'\ue9db'), (67, u'\ue9dc'), (68, u'\ue9dd'), (69, u'\ue9de'), (70, u'\ue9df'), (97, u'\ue9da'), (98, u'\ue9db'), (99, u'\ue9dc'), (100, u'\ue9dd'), (101, u'\ue9de'), (102, u'\ue9df')))

def formatTBC(n, addSign = False):
	s = "%x" % n
	n %= 1
	if n:
		s += '.'
		while n:
			n *= 16
			s += "%x" % n
			n %= 1
	s = unicode(s).translate(toTonalDict)
	s += " TBC"
	if addSign and n >= 0:
		s = "+" + s
	return s

def Bitcoin2TBC(n):
	return n / 65536.

def formatBitcoin(n, addSign = False):
	if not n % 0x10000:
		return formatTBC(Bitcoin2TBC(n), addSign);
	if not n % 1000000:
		return formatBTC(Bitcoin2BTC(n), addSign);
	if not n % 0x100:
		return formatTBC(Bitcoin2TBC(n), addSign);
	s = "%d uBTCents" % (n,);
	if addSign and n > 0:
		s = "+" + s;
	return s;