Proposal for mass adoption: the introduction of a new unit of account

[lionheart78]

If we are talking about adoption, we should go along with the unit that had been long known by the masses.  Creating a new name will just make it confusing to people.  Besides I believe most of people who know Bitcoin is conviniently using the existing unit like BTC, mBTC, and sats.  I also don't think to promote another unit to replace satoshi. It is easier to remember 15 sats than 0.15 Naks, IMO

[OgNasty]

With the already high technical hurdles involved in normal people being able to use and understand Bitcoin, I’m not so sure it’s a great idea to be introducing more things unnecessarily. You have to remember that there are people out there who accidentally bought BCH thinking it was Bitcoin. More units of account seems like a bad idea for adoption.

[AmoreJaz]

With the already high technical hurdles involved in normal people being able to use and understand Bitcoin, I’m not so sure it’s a great idea to be introducing more things unnecessarily. You have to remember that there are people out there who accidentally bought BCH thinking it was Bitcoin. More units of account seems like a bad idea for adoption.

i guess, i will stick to satoshis here. very few are using bits anyway. and to think that people are already confused when they encounter the 'bits' unit. and people will have more confusion if they will hear another one which is nakamotos. the intention may be great, but people need simplicity here. i don't think it will help newcomers to appreciate this top alt having varying units and they need to convert it into the original one just to understand its value.

[Hamza2424]

Hmm, Interesting proposal but my frequent questions are as I'm a student, Why need it? is it necessary while we already have a perfect one? (Sats). What king of change it can bring? Is the community really want the new unit of account? As per my knowledge, I know the answer to each and everyone but as it can be based on my learning I can be wrong somewhere so what is Op's word is on it really matters to me.

Op wants us to comment and I'm sure after reading a perspective with his own understanding he created this topic now really I want to know after learning from the replies and other perspectives on it where Op really stand.

[Sim_card]

OP, your proposal isn't relevant as the unit can be confusing to so many people and it wouldn't help in anyway to increase the adoption if bitcoin. There is mBTC and sats which is preferable because that is what we use for long. So coming up with a new unit and you think that people will buy your idea,it is impossible and not called for. Don't waste more of your time thinking that your idea will work out.

[Christophe_dcy]

Thank you very much for your comments.
I realize that a small diagram would have been welcome from the start, my apologies.

https://www.talkimg.com/images/2023/08/17/MAJM1.jpeg

When I talk about mass adoption, I also mean business accounting, for small shops and so on.
Keeping dual accounts (in MXN and USD, for example) is not easy enough. If, on top of that, you add a currency whose subdivisions have nothing in common with existing currencies, nobody's going to understand it. And it will piss everyone off to deal with satoshis.

Also, I haven't found any answers, but does anyone know why Satoshi Nakamoto decided 1 btc = 10^8 sat? Why 8?

[o_e_l_e_o]

Also, I haven't found any answers, but does anyone know why Satoshi Nakamoto decided 1 btc = 10^8 sat? Why 8?

See this post from Ray Dillinger: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=819656.msg9170781#msg9170781

https://www.talkimg.com/images/2023/08/17/MAzy8.jpeg

The difference between the highest valued (GBP) and lowest valued (INR) fiat currencies on your chart is over 100x, with 1 GBP = 105 INR. Given that you are implying a difference of over 100x is fine for fiat currencies, why isn't it fine to just use sats for bitcoin?

I mean, the paisa barely even exists in India anymore, with the 50 paise coin not minted in over 20 years and every smaller coin completely demonetized. The price of everything in India is denoted solely in rupees, where something like a laptop might cost between ₹30,000 and ₹200,000. What's wrong with just doing the same for sats?

[Christophe_dcy]

See this post from Ray Dillinger: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=819656.msg9170781#msg9170781

Thank you so much for this link!
So if I understand correctly, 10^8 was chosen for technical considerations, not for user experience. Very interesting!

I remember this discussion, actually.  

Finney, Satoshi, and I discussed how divisible a Bitcoin ought to be.  Satoshi had already more or less decided on a 50-coin per block payout with halving every so often to add up to a 21M coin supply.  Finney made the point that people should never need any currency division smaller than a US penny, and then somebody (I forget who) consulted some oracle somewhere like maybe Wikipedia and figured out what the entire world's M1 money supply at that time was.  

We debated for a while about which measure of money Bitcoin most closely approximated; but M2, M3, and so on are all for debt-based currencies, so I agreed with Finney that M1 was probably the best measure.  

21Million, times 10^8 subdivisions, meant that even if the whole word's money supply were replaced by the 21 million bitcoins the smallest unit (we weren't calling them Satoshis yet)  would still be worth a bit less than a penny, so no matter what happened -- even if the entire economy of planet earth were measured in Bitcoin -- it would never inconvenience people by being too large a unit for convenience.

Then

Now that I think of it, we did talk about the floating point format in that discussion.  8-decimal divisibility was the maximum Satoshi would consider, for that reason (although he was a fanatic about doing everything with unsigned integers).   Hal's point about the smallest division being less than a penny, and that being possible even if the whole world's money supply were denominated in Bitcoin, meant no extraordinary measures were necessary.

[o_e_l_e_o]

So if I understand correctly, 10^8 was chosen for technical considerations, not for user experience. Very interesting!

When bitcoin was first launched, the client only showed two decimal places, not 8. Many users at the time did not know it was further subdivisible.

Here's another post from Satoshi which might interest you: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=44.msg267#msg267

Clearly the idea of moving the decimal point never caught on, and I can't see it ever getting enough support to happen now. Working in sats works just fine.

[Christophe_dcy]

When bitcoin was first launched, the client only showed two decimal places, not 8. Many users at the time did not know it was further subdivisible.

Here's another post from satoshi which might interest you: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=44.msg267#msg267

Thank you so much for your research! I find it really respectable that you went digging and came across a statement by Satoshi!

Eventually at most only 21 million coins for 6.8 billion people in the world if it really gets huge.

But don't worry, there are another 6 decimal places that aren't shown, for a total of 8 decimal places internally.  It shows 1.00 but internally it's 1.00000000.  If there's massive deflation in the future, the software could show more decimal places.

If it gets tiresome working with small numbers, we could change where the display shows the decimal point.  Same amount of money, just different convention for where the ","'s and "."'s go.  e.g. moving the decimal place 3 places would mean if you had 1.00000 before, now it shows it as 1,000.00.

So it was Satoshi's original intention to use a currency with 2 decimal digits (like all other currencies).

But above all, he explains very well that the larger the money supply, the greater the need to shift the main unit by 3 digits.
Finally, 13 years after his post, the main unit would have to be shifted by 6 digits.

In fact, it doesn't matter how this unit will be called (bit, nakamoto or whatever), what's important is to respect the original idea and adapt to reality so that using Bitcoin is as simple as possible for the general public.

And yes, of course, technicians like you, the original enthusiasts, would continue to speak with satoshis (that's what I suggested in my diagram, the satoshi is for technical purposes: https://www.talkimg.com/images/2023/08/17/MAJM1.jpeg).