Speculating the benefits of swicthing over to base unit as satoshi

[sana54210]

I read the first price for bitcoin was determined by the electricity cost required to mine a block and from that people would have calculated how many bitcoins for $1 and so on now we are into one bitcoin for $2500+

Similarly why not we switch over to calculating how many satoshi for one dollar. I believe there will be exchanges to be ready to adopt and provide trading facility based on this. As per preev, right now $1= ~4000 satoshi.

Why this :
Stocks trading has a tradition of spiting. Read more on split here :
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/stocksplit.asp
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_split

This is not exact split, but I believe this will serve the purpose of splitting.

Let us discuss,
What are pitfalls we may face if we switch over to new unit.
What will happen suddenly an exchange will provide trading based on unit satoshi.
More importantly how it will influence bitcoin price levels.

[Asrael999]

You don't go straight to satoshi - you first move to 0.001 BTc as a millibit, $2.5. Which is also roughly the cost of getting a median transaction through in a timely fashion at the moment.

[beerlover]

There will be no confusions, I guess.
If you have 1 bitcoins then you will be having 100 million satoshis. That's all.

For positive side, I believe the physiological barrier of "bitcoin is too costly to buy" may get removed. But for that I guess fist we need to start from wallets to support satoshi based calculations for displaying balances and for sending/receiving btc transactions.

[NUFCrichard]

I read the first price for bitcoin was determined by the electricity cost required to mine a block and from that people would have calculated how many bitcoins for $1 and so on now we are into one bitcoin for $2500+

Similarly why not we switch over to calculating how many satoshi for one dollar. I believe there will be exchanges to be ready to adopt and provide trading facility based on this. As per preev, right now $1= ~4000 satoshi.

Why this :
Stocks trading has a tradition of spiting. Read more on split here :
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/stocksplit.asp
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_split

This is not exact split, but I believe this will serve the purpose of splitting.

Let us discuss,
What are pitfalls we may face if we switch over to new unit.
What will happen suddenly an exchange will provide trading based on unit satoshi.
More importantly how it will influence bitcoin price levels.

This already happened in 2013 on Bicoinity when they changed from the Bitcoin to the mBTC.  At the time it meant that 1 mBTC was 1 USD, which was nice.

The Satoshi is too small to be meaningful. No one wants the penny or cent to be broken into 40 parts, it is pretty pointless as it is now!
So to answer the question, I would see that the µBTC could be used when 1 BTC is worth over $100k USD, so 1µBTC is 10 cents.
The Satoshi should be used when Bitcoin is over $10mil, which I guess would mean that the USD is already pretty much dead anyway!

[pooya87]

i think it is a good idea. even if the switch doesn't happen right away, if people start using the smaller units or generally if they are there so they can see them, it will be a lot better.

and also not to mention all the confusion that a large number of newcomers have about the price when they say "we can't afford buying 1 whole bitcoin" that way they can see it is possible to buy a million satoshi for example.

[d5000]

You don't go straight to satoshi - you first move to 0.001 BTc as a millibit, $2.5. Which is also roughly the cost of getting a median transaction through in a timely fashion at the moment.

The problem with this approach is that you regularly add confusion while Bitcoin's price is going up. There is not only the "millibit(coin)" (mBTC) but also the so-called "bit" which is even a smaller unit (also called μBTC, 0.000001 BTC).

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Units

I would stick by the two established units: Bitcoin and Satoshi. A better idea than all the "mBTC" and "uBTC" in my opinion would be the way for example Byteball and IOTA do: to use multipliers like kSat (1000 satoshi) or MSat (1 million satoshis), because they are forward-looking to a time where a satoshi's worth close to 1/10 or 1/100 USD cent and so people would get accustomed to the Satoshi as unit. As bullioner correctly points out, there are already currencies that are similar in value to the Satoshi.

[xIIImaL]

[...]
forward-looking to a time where a satoshi's worth close to 1/10 or 1/100 USD cent [...]

Dunno about forward-looking: a satoshi is already worth 1/40 of a USD cent, thus is already worth between 1/10 or 1/100 USD cent.

Yeah, who knows, in future bitcoin price may reach 1$ for a satoshi. We need a heavy adoption on bitcoin to see the value in the preev or any chart. If we hold the bitcoin itself continuously, fees for mining will increase. I hope people will invest on bitcoin related services and business. Then fees will also reduced. Then can get the cen percent benefit of seeing satoshi= 1USD.

[tonyuser]

well prob now the best unit will be the mBTC i guess its more even over $ or € and like 2 to 3 or 2 £ or so but into 50 years ok lol maybe the satoshi will be like 1€ or even overcome the need of a global bank divided into countires currencies and all be digital like 1 satoshi its a orange juice lol

[leowonderful]

[...]
forward-looking to a time where a satoshi's worth close to 1/10 or 1/100 USD cent [...]

Dunno about forward-looking: a satoshi is already worth 1/40 of a USD cent, thus is already worth between 1/10 or 1/100 USD cent.

Yeah, who knows, in future bitcoin price may reach 1$ for a satoshi. We need a heavy adoption on bitcoin to see the value in the preev or any chart. If we hold the bitcoin itself continuously, fees for mining will increase. I hope people will invest on bitcoin related services and business. Then fees will also reduced. Then can get the cen percent benefit of seeing satoshi= 1USD.

That's incredibly unlikely unless we somehow get some government heavily investing in bitcoin or some country changing its official currency to Bitcoin. Both are unlikely and will likely only occur in the far future where mining no longer yields block rewards, but instead tx fees. That's all I can really think of, it'll take some pretty dramatic change to get there.

[ktabb]

Bitcoin will have to be split again and again indefinitely for as long as it exists. Since people lose private keys, bitcoins can become permanently lost. Given that there is a finite number of bitcoins that will ever exist, the supply of btc will be shrinking pretty much forever, so bitcoins will need to be broken up again and again. The rate at which bitcoins are lost will slow down as value increases and base units keep changing, but it will happen forever. A graph of this phenomenon would show the total available bitcoins in the world approaching zero but never reaching it.

I don't think any of this is a problem for Bitcoin though. Just go to mBTC, then satoshi, then mSatoshi or whatever. Doesn't really matter.

[European Central Bank]

i think it's far too late to make the switch now. the price as is is embedded in the collective conscious and that takes decades to catch up. it should've been done from minute one. if it were possible i wouldn't mess around with mbtc or whatever, i'd go straight to satoshis.

[Hazir]

We don't need to use Satoshis as our main unit. In the future when, hopefully bitcoin price will be much higher it may be necessity to switch.
But for now it would only create additional confusion among users. We are not ready to "think in satoshis" IMO.
If we need to use something else that standard BTC then it should be mBTC instead - 1 mBTC = $2,5 now.

[d5000]

Dunno about forward-looking: a satoshi is already worth 1/40 of a USD cent, thus is already worth between 1/10 or 1/100 USD cent.

Right, I got confused with all the zeroes - so I myself have weakened my argument for kilosatoshi and megasatoshis

So then the sentence should be more correctly (and vaguely) "when the satoshi value is closer to a USD cent."

We are not ready to "think in satoshis" IMO.

There is a group that already "thinks in satoshis", and that is altcoin traders - a pretty large group because speculation is still one of the main use cases for BTC. Also, the satoshi value is getting increasingly better known because of the "satoshi/Byte" value related to the transaction fees. I think it will become gradually more popular in the future.