> The SI base unit for mass is the kilogram.

This reminds me of something I was unaware of until very recently; the decibel (dB), is one tenth of a Bel. The discussion was that you'll never confuse a B(byte) with a B(bel) because we never specify 10dB as 1B, and we almost never need to specify a 10th of a byte.

But back to your point - we use base10 for everything but RAM. So if we'd stuck to one system to avoid confusion, RAM probably wouldn't have won.

> Except when it, of course, isn't. $10M is certainly not ten megadollars.

The unit of currency is the dollar. There is no units of currency that corresponds to 1M dollars.

The SI system of units devised a systematic way to define derived units that reflect a certain amount expressed in the base unit.

Currency don't have the benefit.

>$10M is certainly not ten megadollars.

Money is not covered by S.I./metric units anyway, so not sure what's the point of this argument.

And even at that, while M here is the "mega" unit, the value 10M is still 10 million (1010^6) dollars (not 102^20 dollars).

That's a good point. We might have to start saying megadollars.

M$10 looks kind of clumsy, though.