Bitcoins Fail Currency Test in Scandinavia’s Richest Nation

Re:Bitcoins Fail Currency Test in Scandinavia’s Richest Nation by ryanthejuggler on Friday December 13, 2013 @08:50PM (#6904157)

It irritates me when people talk about "bitcoins", plural. Bitcoin is so divisible that it really seems like more of a "stuff" that can't be pluralized, like sand or water[1].

I forgot where I read it but there was once a description of data that derided the term "datum", singular, to mean one data point. "To anyone who's ever worked with it, data is a _stuff_." Wish I could find the book or article.

[1] Yeah, you can use "sands" or "waters" in a somewhat poetic manner, but that definitely stands out as a special usage.

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Re:Bitcoins Fail Currency Test in Scandinavia’s Richest Nation by keevie on Friday December 13, 2013 @09:03PM (#6904208)

"datum" is pretty common in academic literature. Even more common is treating "data" as grammatically plural: e.g. "The data show..."

There are plenty of examples of plural mass nouns though, and they all have slightly different meanings than the usual sense of the word. peoples, monies, sands, waters, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_noun#Multiple_senses_for_...

language is complicated, and the rules aren't necessarily rationally intuitive.

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Re:Bitcoins Fail Currency Test in Scandinavia’s Richest Nation by SilasX on Friday December 13, 2013 @08:56PM (#6904186)

The terms are "mass noun" and "count noun". You're saying that bitcoin should be regarded as a mass, not a count.

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