[slver]

Everyone is thinking about a "shifted" base 10, yes.

But every base starts with 0, there's no such thing as "shifted base" because then you literally can't represent 0.

Also "zero fingers" is still a thing that exists in this shifted base 10. So it remains base 11.

This is like the classic "0-based indexing" vs. "1-based indexing" dilemma. The "first" thing is represented by 1, we think.

But the "first" year of our life, we're zero years old. The "first" hour after midnight is 0 o'clock. Building your "first" million as a business is the period before you have 1 million. And so on.

[dylanh]

A base 10 with symbols only for 1 through 10, where zero is represented with an empty set is a Bijective Base 10 numeration. The columns in excel are bijective base 26.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bijective_numeration

[slver]

The number of sets we can represent with fingers is 11, including the empty set.

As for bijective base 10, it's interesting, but it's still not the base 10 we're using, so we can't quite blame this on our fingers.