[lou1306]

I think the biggest strength of base 10 is not hand-counting (the OP and the Babylonian/Chinese base-12 method are both superior in that regard), but ease of performing pen-and-paper operations. You can literally teach a 6-year-old to multiply huge numbers effortlessly.

[laszlokorte]

Couldnt you do the same using two additional digits? Say binary and hexedicmal arithmetic are as easy as decimal if you substract the bias of being used to decimal.

[majewsky]

If you use any other base for writing numbers down, it's just as easy to perform pen-and-paper operations. The only problem with larger bases is that the multiplication tables increase quadratically. Whereas a base-10 multiplication table has 100 entries, a base-16 table already has 256 entries.

[dTal]

>a base-10 multiplication table has 100 entries

Not quite! You can safely ignore identities (0, 1, and 10 itself) so you only have 8 numbers in your table. And multiplication is commutative so you only need 8+7+6... (= (8+1)(8/2) as per Gauss) = 36 entries.

Base 16 would have (14+1)(14/2) = 105 entries. So proportional to base-10, actually slightly harder than you said.

[curiousllama]

The classic - detailed correction followed by "but yea you're totally right anyway" lmao

[majewsky]

A fine demonstration how "basically correct in two sentences" is better than "technically correct in five sentences" in most situations.

[ar-nelson]

This video convinced me that base 6 would be even better for simple pen-and-paper math, as well as just about everything else: https://youtu.be/qID2B4MK7Y0