Replies (94)

Here's the journey to realizing this: 1. Initially sound preposterous, confusing, and a non-starter 2. Then you get the concept and why it is best, but seems insurmountable at this point 3. Then you start to see how it could actually happen 4. Then you become an advocate
People understand dollars and cents as units. People don’t understand when words change meaning and remeasuring units entirely. People don’t understand when merchants measure ‘Bitcoin’ differently. Sats are Lindy.
fractalchris's avatar
fractalchris 7 months ago
I don't have a real opinion on this yet but, If we got rid of the word sats and now say that there are 2.1 quadrillion Bitcoin, _AND_ people hear that they can get 967 Bitcoin for a dollar, I'm pretty sure psychologically people would sense it as more of a bargain.??? Just an idea
Judge Hardcase's avatar
Judge Hardcase 7 months ago
It would be way too clumsy to almost always have to refer to bitcoin with 8 digits of precision; so, no. or, are you actually advocating for changing the clearly consensus-accepted definition of 'bitcoin'? If so, hell no.
"I was told there would only ever be 21 million bitcoin..." 🫣
And now, just when I got used to it? For lightning, it is quite useful because you cut extra zeros since things are becoming cheaper with respect Bitcoins.
Normies are more likely to think bitcoin crashed and is dead if we start telling them a meal at Steak n Shake costs 10000 bitcoin. The reaction will "glad I avoided that scam" not "I can afford 1 bitcoin now".
It comes from a book titled Anti-Fragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Fun fact, he also wrote the original introduction to The Bitcoin Standard, but is now having fun staying poor.
yahws's avatar
yahws 7 months ago
Stack bitcoins?(I wish).....stack sats!
SoapMiner's avatar
SoapMiner 7 months ago
Thank you, but...I still don't understand what it means though. 😂🫂
Doesn't changing it once imply that it might be changed again? I don't want to spend the rest of my life listening to people arguing back and forth about whether it's time to redefine the basis again---that doesn't seem very clean to me.
Hundreds of millions of people own bitcoin and billions have heard of it. No more than hundreds of thousands of people have ever heard of sats. We're extremely early with bitcoin as everyday money.
There's only a 100x difference between a dollar and a penny. They're often used together like $4.99. Not the case with bitcoin and sats which have a 100,000,000x difference. The direction we are headed is the elimination of the term bitcoin. Let's avoid that fate while we are still in the early stages of bitcoin as everyday money.
If Bitcoin is successful, that will have to happen eventually. There's only 300,000 sats per person in the world (less than that if we assume some BTC have been lost). People have already tried to address that perceived insufficiency through things like millisats. When we fix it at the consensus layer, which will practically require a hard fork, it would be nice to address the problem forever by allowing arbitrary precision, e.g. allowing output amounts to be defined as a fraction of MAX_MONEY. If that happens, the idea of base units goes away If you assume that we'll never add inflation to Bitcoin, then the monetary constant is the supply, not the fraction of it that we currently transact in.
zerkalo's avatar
zerkalo 7 months ago
Btc is sound money. Sound money shouldn't change its basic functionalities because the masses are stupid and/or uneducated.
Yes. Stop using grams just use kilograms it's so much cleaner. Stop using metres just use kilometres it's so much cleaner etc.
Some people were saying that USA corporations like cashapp and whatever else can just rename sats to Bitcoins and that the masses will just accept it because the corporate elites always get their way
Karadenizli's avatar
Karadenizli 7 months ago
"Bitcoin" will always be used to refer to the network and the money, even if sats are used everywhere. A single sentence explanation is enough for most people and it's stupid to ret con the definition of a bitcoin over it.
2. Then you realise that normie media headlines will be 'bitcoin supply increased to 21 quadrillion' and people laugh when you claim bitcoin is sound money.
I might agree but what a coincidence that in Sanskrit, the word "sat" (सत्) is a foundational philosophical term. It carries meanings like: truth being existence reality what is eternal or unchanging It appears much in ancient Hindu scriptures like the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Rigveda. example: "Sat-chit-ananda" (सच्चितानन्द) is a famous triad meaning truth-consciousness-bliss—used to describe the nature of the divine or ultimate reality.
Yes, I think you hit the head on the nail. It’s like a psychological ‘stock spilt–’ nothing changed fundamentally about how bitcoin works except the UI consensus.
:P's avatar
:P 7 months ago
Go Fuck Yourself.
🤔 there are some generally good arguments for this, namely the perception of accessibility. I also have experienced the confusion from the uninitiated regarding bitcoin, and the perception that it is "out of reach" or "too late." A potential unintended consequence of this change however would be a devalued perception of bitcoin. "Strong" fungible currencies more often than not have subunits. Interestingly, the only fungible monetary instruments without subunits are highly inflated currencies where a singular unit is useless for economic use (VES, ZWL, LBP, TRY, ARS, IRR, SDG, SYP, AOA, ETB, HUF, DONG, etc) USD United States Dollar dollar cent EUR Euro euro cent GBP British Pound Sterling pound penny JPY Japanese Yen yen sen (obsolete, rarely used) CNY Chinese Yuan Renminbi yuan jiao/fen INR Indian Rupee rupee paise AUD Australian Dollar dollar cent CAD Canadian Dollar dollar cent CHF Swiss Franc franc rappen RUB Russian Ruble ruble kopeck BRL Brazilian Real real centavo MXN Mexican Peso peso centavo ZAR South African Rand rand cent NZD New Zealand Dollar dollar cent KRW South Korean Won won jeon (rare) SEK Swedish Krona krona öre NOK Norwegian Krone krone øre DKK Danish Krone krone øre TRY Turkish Lira lira kuruş THB Thai Baht baht satang SAR Saudi Riyal riyal halala AED UAE Dirham dirham fils PKR Pakistani Rupee rupee paisa EGP Egyptian Pound pound piastre NGN Nigerian Naira naira kobo The subunits have had no effect on the majority of the population's ability to understand the difference between units and subunits. Nuclear option probably not necessary.
Kevin Cyber's avatar
Kevin Cyber 7 months ago
How stupid. Y’all can call it whatever the fuck. We know what it is. Bitcoin is Bitcoin, Sats are Sats. You can choose to call it cows but that will not change what it is lol.
Here’s my journey: 1. Realizing how preposterous, confusing and retarded this is. 2. Moving on with my day
Yeahhh… we're gonna need you to shut the fuck up on this one. 💁‍♂️ Stay humble & stack sats. 🤙
Every single one of those units actually have infinite precision; so yes. There are many things in the world that are measured in fractions of a cent. While uncommon in day to day commerce, it exists, and markets don't get confused. When USD was strong, dollars were out of reach, and cents were used day to day. People didn't get confused. I am not sure coddling the public and treating them like toddlers is the path towards a sefl-sovereign society. I do understand the arguments, but like many others, it is suspicious that this "decision" is an elitist, top-down initiative. It feels contrived.
Disagree. I've never met anyone who was confused by the smallist division of a bitcoin being called a sat. Not any of the blue collar people I've spoken to, not my parents nor my grandparents.
Great brand? Most normal people either think "scam" or "rich white men" right now, which is an improvement from past associations, but still. In any case, sats doesn't destroy the brand. To the contrary; it augments it. (My 2 sats.)
Ratio wise, you do realise the difference between dollars and cents and. sats and bitcoin? In the whole wide financial world, do we have a word for 100 million of something for which there exists a common word for just1 of that something? Or even 10 million? Or even 1 million? There is a reason all such word pairs fall under a certain ratio. 1:100 is well within limit, 1:100,000,000 is absurd.
lol I just gave you the example with Angstroem and Meter. (Ratio of 1:10,000,000,000) You can call MegaSats, KiloSats, just like there is milliSats in lightning. And if you are worried by 8 zeroes instead of 9, go study eastern culture where they use Lakhs and Crores with even spaces (2 units). Stop shoving your naive take.
Basically the Sats-Bitcoin word pair is not a functional word pair in any sort of concrete retail sense. It's a theoretical word pair that will dissolve on contact with the real world. Sats will be all that's needed in a retail context, there is nothing the word Sats will need from the word Bitcoin. So not a pair.
Oh please, lakhs and crores are another obviously false comparison. These as slang for amounts exist under the umbrella of rupees (or whatever else is being counted). A dollar doesn't exist under the umbrella of something else.
all these big words, but what's your point? I clearly gave you a unit ratio comparison with word-pair that you say shouldn't exist in real world: Angstrom to meter. But you completely ignore it. Within the term rupees, I gave you examples of lakhs (10^5) and crores (10^7). So just like 10crores = 10,000,000 rupees, 1 bitcoin = 10,000,000 sats.
>So just like 10crores = 10,000,000 rupees, 1 bitcoin = 10,000,000 sats. But the name of the currency is "rupees", do you see the difference? It's named after the base unit. By your logic, 1 bitcoin = 100,000,000 Sats *and the currency is Sats*. Bitcoin happens to be but a slang denomination of a large amount of the currency we all know formally as Sats. It's all backwards you see? That said, that for me is fine. Rebrand the entire thing as Sats and I'm okay with that, at least it's clean.
No, you are again using one truth to guide towards false claims. The SI unit of length is meters, i.e., the base unit. Angstroem is 10^-10 of the base unit. 1 meter = 10,000,000,000 Angstrom doesn't mean base unit is Angstroem.
That's just another false comparison. For length, the quantum unit for everything is the planck length. Anything else is arbitrary. Calling 1 meter a "base unit" for this or that is just something someone decided one day. In currency, the base or quantum unit is the smallest indivisible unit in common circulation. For dollars, that's $0.01. There are no half-pennies in circulation. For Rupees it's one Rupee. If the currency is named after the quantum unit then you can get away with any slang for any higher amount, the whole ratio thing no longer applies because it’s not the same problem. If the currency is *not* named after the quantum unit, as is the case with dollars (cents being the quantum), then the ratio problem does indeed come into play. So you have to find an apples to apples comparison.
I like how how you brought quantum physics into discussion. In that case, let me bring the analogy of relativity, and compare bitcoin with speed of light, c. Bitcoin's global truth is 21 Million bitcoin. Anything else is arbitrary. And like I mentioned earlier, you cherry pick parts you like, and ignore what you don't. see below: > There were half-pennies in circulation in 1800s. Check Lyn Alden's Broken money. > Rupees have smaller units called paisa. 100 paisa = 1 rupees.
See "in common circulation". Neither the half-penny nor the paisa are in common circulation, neither physically nor digitally. Case closed. You are the one who brought physical length into the discussion, and we need physics for length. Both a meter and an angstrom can be expressed in terms of the Planck length. There is no other "base unit" for length. To say one meter is some kind of official global base unit for length is goofy. It's just a unit some people picked to compare to in some situations, and any other unit can also be compared to. Bitcoin's 21 million bitcoin is completely arbitrary, decided by humans. Last time I checked humans didn't have all that much into into the speed of light, but hey, I wasn't in the room.
> Half-penny and paisa were in common circulation until inflation wiped it out. cents and dimes will also go away as well given the rate of dollar inflation. > Try changing the 21Million cap and you will see that no nodes will accept it: no one wants to willingly dilute their worth. That is what I mean by Bitcoin's global truth. Bitcoin is a deflationary currency. What happens when we need units smaller than one sat? For instance, Lightning uses milli-sats. What happens to the base money then, just keep redefining the base unit? Your reductionist viewpoint doesn't bode well.
> Half-penny and paisa were in common circulation until inflation wiped it out. cents and dimes will also go away as well given the rate of dollar inflation. Which changes nothing. If half-penny were in common circulation then it would be the smallest individual unit in common circulation. There's always one (and only one) unit that ticks that box. > Try changing the 21Million cap and you will see that no nodes will accept it: no one wants to willingly dilute their worth. That is what I mean by Bitcoin's global truth. The cap cannot be changed. What can be changed is how the cap is expressed. I can be 1.90m or 190cm, doesn't change my height. >Lightning uses milli-sats. What happens to the base money then, just keep redefining the base unit? If the millisat becomes the smallest individual unit in common circulation the that's what happens. If the currency is called Sats it just becomes a case where Sats isn't the smallest. That's how dollars and penies work. Zooming out, the key point is what I call the grocery store test. If you can’t price things you'll find in the grocery store in Unit X—and have that pricing be easily parsable by the human brain—then Unit X should NOT be the name of the currency. The dollar, the pound and the rupee all pass the grocery store test. Therefore they are all workable names for a currency. Bitcion does not pass the grocery store test. You cannot price one can of soup at 0.00001 BTC and another can of soup at 0.0001 BTC and have the brain be able to see that second can is10 times more expensive. Brain isn't wired for such ratio parsing. You have to price everything in Sats and Sats alone. Every major currency in the world passes the grocery store test (because of how the brain works). Therefore if we use Sats for the grocery store then the word and symbol for Bitcoin will have no job in that context. They'll gets fired by Sats. Which, if that's what you want, then ok.
Whatever floats your boat man. You started by saying for a currency we need the smallest base unit that is not further divisible, and the likes of Jack and you want to call it "Bitcoin". As a counter example, I said L2 further divides the base unit, which I call "sats" into "millisats", so my question is, where you draw the line of redefining the base unit? As I said, Bitcoin is deflationary currency so, in 100 years, what happens when we need micro-sats in L2? I'll give you my main summary. My point is the base unit is Bitcoin, and there is 21 million of them. You can divide it to smaller units as you want (L2, L3, maybe even soft fork L1). You can call it sats, bits, micro-sats, micro-bits, etc. Giving your example, your height is 1.90m /190 cm. You can even call it 1,900mm or 1,900,00 um etc. What you cannot do is redefine the units and say your height is 190 m, and that is the crux of the matter. In regards to using as medium of exchange, it depends on the size of the transaction. For a house price, you'll say it costs 4 bitcoin, not 400,000,000 sats. And for a milk, you'll say its costs 400 sats not 0.00000400 btc. The human mind will adopt to the correct size designation, like we use for length scale (lightyears), mass scale (amu) and time scale measurements (millenia). At this point, I am done discussing this matter any further, as its clear we have agreed to disagree.
No, my argument is simply that the currency should pass the grocery store test. If we keep Sats as Sats and rename the whole currency as Sats, that's fine. (It's what'll happen anyway over time.) If we keep the currency as Bitcoin and rename sats as Bitcoin, that's fine too. Both options work. Take your pick.