Bitcoin Forum

As Bitcoin increases in value, I'm noticing that a few people are quoting prices in Sats rather than Bitcoin. One US dollar is currently worth about 9,400 Sats, and if Bitcoin continues to increase, fractional prices will start to become an inconvenience. Share prices often increase when there is a share split, and the use of Sats rather than Bitcoin is very much like a share split. Do you think that this will increase the appeal of Bitcoin, and thus increase the price?

Maybe the long term investors amongst us should encourage the use of "Satoshis", or the more affectionate "Sats". :)

I prefer denominating things in mBTC for the time being. BTC is too large for small USD values, and sats is too small for large USD values, whereas mBTC lies somewhere in the middle.

USD	BTC	Sats	mBTC
$1	0.000094 BTC	9,400 sats	0.094 mBTC
$10	0.00094 BTC	94,000 sats	0.94 mBTC
$100	0.0094 BTC	940,000 sats	9.4 mBTC
$1000	0.094 BTC	9,400,000 sats	94 mBTC

Try saying all of those out loud. Zero point zero zero zero zero nine four is awkward, as is nine million four hundred thousand. mBTC is (at current prices) the most easily workable denomination, and also avoids having to count zeros, which you have to do when dealing in BTC or if someone doesn't include the commas in satoshi.

Satoshi could well become the denomination of choice in the future, but at the moment, I think mBTC is the easiest to work with both visually and verbally.

I believe that Satoshis will be used more often, but not at this stage, we need much bigger price for it. Still, I have no doubts that 1 full Bitcoin will remain to be main number, no matter of price.
@o_e_l_e_o, mBTC been used on gambling websites for long years already, but personally for me this denomination isn't very convenient. I use it rarely and I simply can't remember how much 1 mBTC is converted into Bitcoin. So, I prefer Satoshis for small amounts.

We do this everyday here. Some people for speed just skip the zeroes. If someone says 94, it means 94 thousand, or they say 940 for 940 thousand.

mBTC is garbage because, it has both non decimals and decimals. Give me a brake decimals from decimals? Get lost.
Also "at current prices", is your biggest flaw. You cannot push a BIP (https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0176.mediawiki) over something that can and WILL change and is outside of Bitcoin to begin with.

If my internet wasn't garbage i would show you pictures of prices. Restaurant menus, shops, everything is expressed like satoshis, now that my currency is 75% the value of a satoshi. You should go to history, since you never lived a reality with hyperinflation, how did people lived with those zeroes, and you will find the same answer. Some Euro countries did have fun with zeroes before the €, but Americans and British have no idea.

Do not try to force an euro / dollar centric view on prices. Satoshis do work FINE, mBTC do not. A hundred million satoshis isn't even hard, i will refrain from talking about the Pengo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_peng%C5%91), everyone loves the Pengo, socialist central planified economy at its best...

PS: If our current gov doesn't fall, we WILL dethrone Hungary, but first Zimbabwe...

Just because some countries weigh their banknotes rather than counting them it's not an argument.
I've been doing about 10 purchases last month and I clearly remember that just one was in satoshi, 419473463 stuff that got me thinking.... damn those guys, till the last fifth of a cent are you going to charge me?

And the same argument for you about current prices, what will happen when bitcoin hits 1 million?
By bye Eurocents, bye-bye penny cause we can't calculate them anymore?

I actually find the mbit pretty helpfull while bitcoin hovers in the x thousands area, 1 mbit is /1000 of it.
Is bitcoin 3000$ dollars, a mbit is 3$,  is BTC 12.5k then a mbit is 12.5$.
Since most than 99% of the things in Europe are above 0.1 mbit, it pretty easy, I actually changed all my wallets to show the balance in mbits, especially since I never hold more than 100-200 in my spending wallets.

mBTC seems good in theory but in action i have seen many people having trouble with the unit conversion not knowing how much 1 mBTC is for example. so it may cause a lot more confusion. Satoshi unit on the other hand is more convenient since usually people know there are 8 decimal places after 1BTC. and we can always use both, BTC for large amounts and Satoshi for small ones. (ninety four hundred sat seems easy to say)

Right now one Satoshi is worth just $0.0001, and in my opinion there is no point in using such a small denomination. We should rather be using mBTC instead of BTC. As pr the current exchange rates, one BTC is equivalent to $11,800 and one mBTC is equal to $11.80. The Bitcoin price has increased over the years and since most of the users look at the price per unit rather than the total market capitalization, it gives an impression that Bitcoin is much more expensive that it actually is.

Rather than quoting the prices in mBTC, my suggestion is to redenominate Bitcoin. Currently we have a circulating supply of 17.865 million coins and a total supply of 21 million. Why can't we split all the existing Bitcoins by 10,000 through a hard fork? That will bring the price to $1.18 per coin, and much closer to the per unit value of US Dollar. The circulating supply would increase to 178.65 billion and the total supply would increase to 210 billion. And no one would ever complain that Bitcoin is expensive.

I also prefer to use Sat/s or the full version Satoshi/s. There will certainly come a time when the ones who will use BTC are the rich ones, talking about huge amounts and transactions, while those who are at the lower level will be talking about Sats. Moreover, if the adoption will reach its peak and people are already buying small stuff and daily needs in BTC, for sure it will be about Sats, say 10K Sats or 15K Sats. In fact, it is already coming handy these days, rather than saying 0.001 BTC or the confusing 1 mBTC.

Yes, I actually think using a smaller denomination of bitcoin on exchanges and on marketcap sites will cause the bitcoin price and dominance to go higher regardless if it's sats or mBTC. While most people know that you can own a fraction of a bitcoin, unit bias exists among people. There are some people that buy XRP and other sub $1-$10 coins because "the price is low".

So do most fiat systems, and no one has issues discerning the difference between $1.50 and $15.

Who said anything about a BIP? I even agreed Satoshi is likely to become the denomination of choice in the future. I'm not trying to force anyone else to use mBTC, simply stating that I find it the easiest denomination to work in at current prices.

And I could show you similar pictures or screenshots of sites with prices in mBTC. Each to their own. The only time I personally use sats is when talking about fees.

Maybe Americans aren't used to metric system, but the rest of the world already uses on a daily basis units with milli-, like millimeters and milliliters, so mBTC if very intuitive for them. The problem with satoshi is that it's just too much decimals right now. If you want to buy something for a few bucks online, you'd already have to deal with 4-5 digits, while mBTC will have only 1-2 digits. Bitcoins and satoshis are not enough, 8 orders of magnitude is just too much, we need some middle ground, and mBTC is the perfect candidate, because it's intuitive to people who use metric system.

I don't really like mBTC. It seems to be an uncomfortable representation. I hope that Ksats will start to appear asBitcoin goes up in value. That fits in with established weights and measures representation.

For lightning network transactions the term sats is more preferable because TX's there are lower.

I've been using mBTC sometimes but most of the time I just use btc as label because I get used to it. Both for me are good rather than with a lot of zeroes for satoshi's although it has been labeled to credit Satoshi Nakamoto.

It's mostly just because mBTC is barely used besides just a few websites/services. I can see people getting used to mBTC like how some people are sort of(?) slowly getting used to sats because of a good number of lightning wallets defaulting with sats and not btc.

Sats will always be use more since it's the unit of bitcoin and it easily quote the value without the stress of struggling to stress-fully quote the decimal place in bitcoin when one is invoked  in mere discussion and price speculation.

This makes the most sense. I don't know why there are people arguing about this mBTC makes a lot of sense. 1000kb is 1mb 1000ml is 1 litre. Satoshi is best for fees like you said you your other post.

It is basically bit cents 100 cents is 1 btc. 1mbtc is 1/10 of a bit cent. Much easier that way. Otherwise you can use satoshi and say "I will spend 4 and a half bit cents cents today" "I will spend 1 cent and 350k satoshi" Or even "Today I will spend 3.35 bit cents. Below 1 bit cent you can use satoshi.

1024 kb is 1 mb (Sorry for nitpicking :D )

On the other hand , I agree with you, mbtc is a possible solution. I'm fine with x Ksat and other similar things but the less zeroes before or after the decimal point makes a number the easiest to recognize, and as long as BTC will stay in the 10K USD range (I mean unless it will skyrocket to 100K USD or 1000K USD, but this is not a problem of today I guess :D ) this mBTC seems a good solution for now.

That's because you use USD, we don't(can't). To us (at this moment), a bitcoin is roughly 175 million to buy and 160 million to sell. A bitcoin is just 100 million satoshis.

The mBTC is clearly an $€ centrist point of view.

Re-denomination isn't bad per-se. It shouldn't really require a hardfork, simply an informational bip so that people stop calling 100 million satoshis 1 bitcoin.

The BIP could say something along the lines of: from now on, 1 bitcoin is not 100 million satoshis, but 100 thousand satoshis (100 000 000 to 100 000) if you were to please the $€ centrist mBTC crowd. Therefore there would be not 21 million bitcoins, but 21 billion (short scale) or 21 milliard (long scale).

Then those with 1 BTC would now have 1000 BTC, but in reality nothing else is changing, that's what re-denomination is about. You just turn mBTC into BTC and BTC into 1000 BTCs. Simple.

Unfortunately this also brings confusion. I know we have lived 3 re-denominations here in the past two decades, and the last one wasn't even a year ago, given hyperinflation dynamics, i expect another one soon and sooner until the useless idiots in power give up having a local coin, like what happened to Zimbabwe...

In the meantime, I'll stick calling things in either bitcoins or satoshis. I'm not going to deal with mBTC cents, thank you very much.

Ok, I understand what you are trying to say. The value of bitcoin is too high so when talking about smaller value, instead of saying BTC we can use satoshi. But how the hell is this going to cause a price pump? You think people will start buying more just because we now call smaller/fractional coins satoshi? We have been using the terms satoshi, mBTC and μBTC ( microbtc rarely used though) from the very beginning. This is nothing new.

I could say the same, you're looking at this from a perspective of someone living in a country with hyperinflation. Most people live in countries where the inflation is in the single digits per year, and to them mBTC will make more sense, at least at current BTC exchange rates. Ideally all Bitcoin clients should have the option to switch between all major units. I find it more convenient when the prices don't have too many digits and I don't have to guess like you described it what unit someone's using if it's not clearly marked.

You know what you can do with 1 Satoshi ?
- Nothing
It haven't yet increased to the price where the Satoshis Can actually make a difference , right now the price is too low to even make a use of 100 Satoshis .
Interestingly some advertising companies use this to actually lure in the people , to watch videos and then give them 1-2 Satoshis and this works with the ones who don't know how big a Satoshi is.
I think it would still take some time to make Satoshi what it is made for.

What ever unit you prefer to use, the value is all the same so what's the point? That's why it doesn't matter for me if it is called in Satoshi or mBtc because I can use it if I want to. However, I still stick on the term Btc because that's the majority and that's what I got used to.

As long as you know the conversion units then this might not be a big deal for you. Yeah! "one hundred million satoshis" is longer to write than "one bitcoin" but there's an easier way to write it. It could be 100M SAT and 1 BTC, I don't find it a hassle task at all :).

Yes I think Sats is being used more often than we know I think most of us are using it whenever we describe a price.
For example when the price of something that we want would fall down to something about BTC0.001 most of us would say it like 0.001 BTC instead we would say 100k Sats.
We usually use Sats and Bits when it isn't going to reach a whole BTC but I think what ever we call it wouldn't really affect the price of 1 BTC.

And why does your currency keep being re-denominated? Or why did Zimbabwe's? Because people struggle to work with values of several billions and trillions, so the currency was re-denominated to bring it back towards 1s, 10s, 100s, etc., which people can understand, work with, and compare much more easily.

mBTC (or even bits or kilo-sats as JC suggested) are simply the denominations which have the fewest number of preceding or succeeding zeroes. They are easier to read, they are easier to say, they are easier to compare. You never have to count 5 or 6 zeroes to make sure you are sending the right amount. Knowing that 1 mBTC is roughly 10 dollars (for example), you can easily eyeball a number and get a feel for it in fiat, which is much harder to do if you are thinking 100,000 sats is 10 dollars or 0.001 BTC is 10 dollars.

But as I said before, I'm not trying to force anyone else to use them. If you like using sats, then you use sats. Luckily, bitcoin has several denominations to suit all tastes.

Maybe it's not so important nowadays, but if Bitcoin is going to grow, it will be way more useful to quote prices in Satoshi. But it's hard to adjust to changes. I find it difficult to convert the prices in my mind, without turning to some tools. Not because it's difficult, but because I am not used to it. And I think that the price per BTC makes more sense these days that the price per Satoshi or of 1 dollar is Satoshis.
And I guess others are right to bring in the game things like mBTC first. As the price will grow, I think we'll be slowly moving towards Satoshis through other nominative units first.

The name bitcoin would always dominate over satoshi  just like the US dollar and cent. Most people are not comfortable with quoting "Satoshi" when dealing with small amount of bitcoin. Personally, I prefer saying bitcoin instead of satoshi irrespective of how small the amount or bitcoin.

Many currencies have a different word for the unit of a currency. For example Sterling is the word to describe the Britsh currency, and it has a variety of units within that - The Pound, Pennies, Sovereigns, Britannias and Guineas. The Pound and the Penny are the most common ones, and mst people don't know of the others. The Chinese currency is known as the Renminbi, but most people seem to use the Yuan, which is the trading unit. The difficult with Bitcoin is the massive gap between the Satoshi and one Bitcoin, and one can only assume that Satoshi's vision was for Bitcoin to achieve such a stratified value, that the Saroshi became the practical unit of exchange.

Once you move into the world of investment currencies, things can get a bit complex. For example, a gold Britannia has a face value of £100, and is legal tender in the UK.A single coin currently costs £1,320.09 ( it was sub-£1,000 not so long ago ). That is 132,009 pennies. Obviously public use will be based on the most convenient and univerally recognised denomination. My point ws that people may feel richer when they have 132k pennies rather thasn one Britannia. In fact this is not really a valid comparison, as a Britannia is minter from 24 carat gold,and thus has a high intrinsic value. The penny is manufactured from base metals, and thus has a value related to the fiat currency. I believe that Bitcoin will become an investment unit, raher than a trading unit in ther future.

Satoshi wasn't the one to come up with the idea to name the smallest unit of Bitcoin after its creator, it was ribuck's idea:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=407442.msg4415850#msg4415850

We all have smart phones these days, so to quickly fire up Preev.com and to convert Fiat value to Bitcoin is not a big ask for most people. I personally think the "Satoshi" denomination will be too complicated and the volatility will cause a lot of micro changes in the price. Example : One moment the price is 0.00045623 and after a few seconds it might be 0.00047230 etc.. so people will struggle to work with that.

One zero in the wrong place will also cause people to lose a lot of money, if you do not concentrate on what you doing.  ::)

Which is exactly the case with mbtc, bits or whatever. I still find it confusing. I would have to check a converter for anything priced in mbtc every single time. Me brain can't wrap itself around it.

BTC or Satoshis are the only units that make sense to me. Anything in the middle has the potential for expensive mistakes and confusion.

Well I'm one of those people who use sats instead of Bitcoin because of how easy it is to say and to use. It does make an appeal but I doubt it will be a reason for a price increase. People will still need to find a decisive thing in Bitcoin that would make them invest in it or rather use it in their everyday lives. As time goes by, I think sats will be use more in the future.

Maybe if the valued sats now then bitcoin will pump. For this is the only way to make the price go back to 21k.maybe people will are just making any way just to make the price to go up.

Many of us has actually been using satoshi without recognizing it, because for you to use btc, then you must be making at least a transaction that is equivalent to the current value of bitcoin, and no matter the btc we had to the from of our statement or transaction, provided that it is still 0. Then I think it still belongs to satoshi.

So payment has always been in satoshi, I mean smaller payments, most of the money I have collected has been in satoshi, it is when I then pile it up that I would say it is in btc. I have also been trading more in satoshi and when I convert, I convert from satoshi into fiat, so satoshi is actually not new and people have been using it a lot without knowing.

mBTC is much formal to use as a small unit of BTC, it might be confusing for some, but they will get used to it, wallet services can also use it, but they should give choices on what the user preferred to use. But for sure, most will stick to the original.

Same here. I'd prefer to stick with BTC myself -- the way it's always been. Trying to use mBTC and especially smaller units always screws with my head. Everyone trying to change the unit all the time -- especially with no widespread agreement among mBTC, bits, satoshis, etc. -- just makes things confusing for everyone.

Some people obviously just want to link the unit to dollar value. To them I'd ask, are we just going to keep adjusting units every time Bitcoin increases (or decreases) in value? Is that really a logical approach?

I don't see a reason to use satoshis or mbtc all of a sudden. Is paying 0.1 so much different than 0.01 for the same thing?

I can see what some people see in this because it will get crazy once bitcoin is used for payments and becomes worth 30 thousand dollars or more and you will have to pay 0.0001 for a cup of tea but we aren't there yet. If people in some countries like Venezuela had to pay thousands for the same cup you can pay 0.0001. It's all the same.

For many people seeing prices start to have more zeroes to the right of the decimal point  every year or every other year, is confusing, but it all comes down to personal preference, that's why we get people using different units. I personally don't mind the mBTC unit, or just plain BTC if there aren't too many zeroes, but I'm not really a fan of using satoshis (except for fees per B), and bits even less so.


I don't think many are buying single cups of coffee with Bitcoin, but if they are then 0.0001 BTC sounds like a right price for coffee in a cheaper cafe. 0.0001 BTC or 0.1 mBTC is about a dollar, and in line what one will pay for a coffee in some student pubs/bars here.

For people dealing with the metric system daily, it makes more sense, if a bitcoin is x thousands an mbtc is x.
But for the ones that are not used to this, yeah probably it gets confusing just as how a race one mile 3 furlongs and 211 yards long look like ..what the hell to me.:D.


As I said before it's about how easy is for some of us to deal with those prices especially since the mbtc is close to being 10x the us and the euro.
Most of my purchases are somewhere between 1mbtc to 15 mbtc.

Something costs 5 mbtc, I can simply make the math in my head and 5x9.5 , 47.5
Now, is not quite the same for 0.005 x 9500, or in case of the satoshi advocates 500000x0.000095 (hell I don't even know if I got the numbers of zeros right)  ;D
For the cup of coffee, a fancy one is something like 0.3 to 0.5 mbtc, which sounds a lot better than 0.0003 or 0.0005 in my opinion.

Of course the whole thing will not work so smooth as the price goes further up, but for now, for some of us is far easier to deal.