Nostr Web Client

What portion of the global population uses bitcoin, and is familiar with the word "sat"? 1%? 0.001%? Whatever it is, that is the extent to which "sat" is established.

Explaining what "sats" means to people who are new to Bitcoin, or even those who are not new to Bitcoin but are unfamiliar with "sat", is a tedious exercise, often met with confusion. It is not intuitive for them, nor easy to remember. If we just call the units bitcoins, that problem goes away; there would be nothing extra to remember. It is a lower cognitive load for new users. It also removes the "I can't afford a bitcoin" unit bias that a surprising number of people have.

Jivan Pal 2mo ago

A large portion of the population is already familiar with bitcoin and its price in dollar terms. Suddenly shrinking that by a hundred-million-fold is going to be nothing but confusing. "Yeah, you saw bitcoin was $100k each last week, but now it's just a tenth of a cent. No, no, it's not because there was a price crash, it's just because we changed the definition, you see."

By contrast, saying, "just like there are 100 cents to a dollar, there are 100 million sats to a bitcoin, so it's usually more convenient to talk about sats than bitcoin," is not at all something I've ever had difficulty getting across to people in my 10 years of using and explaining bitcoin.

Reply to this note

Please Login to reply.

Discussion

₿rent 2mo ago

Some new people I’ve talked to get it right away, but most newbs’ eyes glaze over. Other people in the real world see this too:

https://primal.net/e/nevent1qqsqtqf623auevk9g2v2lpeam8xvuhrhc9r4clmd7rufyzcdjnjuddgj394es

The proposal recommends leaving the BTC ticker the same, so the price would be unaffected.

At least in the short term. I think that over time, exchanges might shift to the commonly used syntax — if bitcoin becomes widely used for payments. Which is going to take a long time.