mainly agree xbit should mainly refer to transfers speed, but it is also a pretty useless measurement for that since everyone has to learn byte sizes in their imagination due to it being a practical requisite in understanding filespace usage as a user, ethernet speeds where Mbit terminology is used, would in my opinion also be more practically described in “actually transferrable” Megabyte rates, as most headline theoretical max’s are often not acheived in practice …

ie ? 100mbit ethernet means you can move 10 Megabyte’s per second, ie a 10 megabyte file on 100mb ethernet can theoretically be copied from one machine on a network to another, in practice you might get 6-8 megabytes a second with packet structure & overheads, drive speed, signal issues etc what counts to the user is actual megabytes per second transferred not theoretical maximums or xbit based measurements for transfer speeds.

Bit based storage measurements as I stated earlier were used by cart makers to make cartridge storage capacities sound bigger sadly popularising the term Mbit to describe storage size in that arena, muddying the seperation between xbit for transfer and xbyte for storage size, so a cart maker claimed theres was the first xMbit cart inflating perceived storage by 8 ie 256Mbit cart sounded big but was in fact 32Megabytes in size, the largest carts for the N64 were marketed as 512Mbit etc.

your adsl modem for instance might state its Mbps as 24 Mbps /24,000 Kbps speed, meaning in theory you can download around 2.4 Megabytes per second at maxiumum, but ADSL is truly an arena where Mbps is used a selling tool for transfer speed, by pulling you in with theoretical maximums, but the connection speed your modem actually gets and then the final transfer rate in megabytes you actually get between one ip and another rarely corrolate to the figure you are sold, due to many factors