Decimal and thousand seperators!

Hey everybody!

Yesterday there upstood a quite funny situation because of the difference in writing numbers in different country's. Its not necessary the numbers you write different but more how you use decimal and thousand seperators. A decimal seperator is the sign you use to show wich part in a number are decimals. A thousand seperator is a sign to show the amount of thousand in a number.

Source

So what happened?

Just now I am holding a contest wich is called "crypto guess" where you have to guess wich crypto I search with the help of 3 hints. This week I wrote a hint about the price of a cryptocurrency. In this hint I wrote that about 70.000 of these coins was the same as 1 bitcoin. In the country where I come from (the Netherlands) this means 70 thousand because the dot in that number is a thousand seperator. It appears that there are country's out there where this dot is seen as a decimal seperator so I had someone who thought I meant 70.

I got surprised because for me it was so clear that it was 70 thousand especially because I wrote 3 times 0 behind the dot. If it had been 70 I wouldn't have written a dot at all. I decided to google because before this situation I didn't even think about that people could have a different usage in different countries. I found a page on wikipedia with a list of countries and the way they use their decimal and thousand seperators.

In some countries they use a dot as a decimal seperator and a comma as a thousand seperator. In the Netherlands its exact opposite so thats where it went wrong in my contest. There even is a difference between Sweden where I live now and the Netherlands where I come from. In the Netherlands we prefer to write like this:

2.433.547,23

While Sweden prefers to leave the dot away and just write like this:

2 433 547,23

I will be more careful now tough and just write 70 thousand or 70 000 the next time so that there is no missunderstanding about comma's or dots. So if people ever missunderstand your way of writing numbers then google for decimal seperator and check how it's used in other countries!