Bitcoin is also a currency, why is its unit so different from the commonly used

[P2PECS]

For me the surprising thing would be the opposite. BTC being an innovation that breaks radically with traditional currencies, it is normal that it is different in many aspects.

And I wouldn't say it's also a currency. It is a currency, it was devised and launched as a currency, but it has turned out to be such a good and valuable currency that many people buy it as a safe haven and as an investment.

I also like to speak only in terms of bitcoin or satoshis, all the middle terms I also find confusing.

[1715011215]

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[Argoo]

I've been somewhat of a huge advocate for using a small denominator as well. Specifically, sats. Yes, 1 sat is around like $0.0003, but it'll probably be fine in the long term.

People seem to be naturally attracted towards 'cheap' prices. The same reason why the likes of DOGE, SHIB, ADA have gotten so much attention from retail noobs — because of their decimal price.

One bitcoin contains one hundred million satoshis. When it was created, Satoshi Nakamoto himself did not know how popular his bitcoin would be and therefore, I think, played it safe by including such a large number of bitcoin components. Given the limited number of bitcoins, this is a very far-sighted decision. In this regard, we can not worry that someone will not get his treasured part. In addition, it is also convenient when using it if it will have a very high price.

[o_e_l_e_o]

That, and if we want to put more emphasis on bitcoin as 'money', paying "17k sats"(hopefully far lower in number in the future) is far better than paying "zero point zero zero zero seventeen BTC" for a cup of coffee. Using decimals is horrendous UX.

I don't know. I agree that sats is easier for "spending money" levels of usage, and I prefer sats for amounts up to around 0.001 BTC, but beyond that then I prefer using BTC for the same reason that you have said, but in reverse. It is easier to say "point two five three eight bitcoin" than it is to say "twenty five million, three hundred and eighty thousand sats".

Obviously it's going to be extremely difficult because it's going to need mass consensus and a lot of organizing, with preferably with most platforms switching to sats at a certain exact day and time.

When we can't even convince people to actually hold their own coins in their own wallet, then good luck convincing them to make this narrative shift. Ultimately, given that the name of the entire ecosystem is the same name as the unit, then I can't see you ever disentangling the two. For example, talking about running Bitcoin Core, worked on by the bitcoin developers, to set up your own bitcoin node, to sync to the bitcoin network, to use to receive a bitcoin transaction, so you can hold a few million satoshis. Most people won't buy it.

I think the base unit will be bitcoin in the media and on exchanges forever, even if we do eventually reach such a price that most people talk about satoshis when transacting.

[kryptqnick]

I don't think the units matter that much. I don't like the 1μBTC unit, to be honest. I think that units should be made for convenience, and 1 of something should be clear, graspable, and also not totally worthless. 1 BTC is too much, but 1 μBTC is too little. I'm comfortable with mBTC, and with parts of Bitcoin (0.001, 0.002, etc). I know people who instead talk about 100,000 Satoshi, 200,000 Satoshi, etc., but I can't immediately guess how much this or that is. As long as people understand each other and use the denomination that helps them understand how much value they're talking about, I think it's all good.

[nullama]

The best way to write a number of bitcoins is to use exactly 8 digits of precision, that way you can either think in terms of BTC or sats by just focusing on the left or right side of the number.

Example:

Code:

0.12300000. Think in terms of BTC, so that's basically 0.123 BTC
0.00045678. Think in terms of sats, so that's basically 45,678 sats

[ChiBitCTy]

This is so it came be broken down to a fraction of a fraction. Keep in mind bitcoin only has a finite about of coins to ever be minded unlike traditional fiat which can be continue to be printed limitlessly. Hopefully bitcoin continues to progress and becomes used as a currency more often so this way of being denominated is important for that factor.

[mk4]

I don't know. I agree that sats is easier for "spending money" levels of usage, and I prefer sats for amounts up to around 0.001 BTC, but beyond that then I prefer using BTC for the same reason that you have said, but in reverse. It is easier to say "point two five three eight bitcoin" than it is to say "twenty five million, three hundred and eighty thousand sats".

True, but that is today. Assuming that bitcoin gets more and more expensive in the future, we're going to use a lot more of the hundreds and thousands range of sats rather than millions; depending on what you're buying of course. Whereas with bitcoin, the decimal would just move further and further and would add more and more zeroes. Using sats this early is just for future proofing.

When we can't even convince people to actually hold their own coins in their own wallet, then good luck convincing them to make this narrative shift. Ultimately, given that the name of the entire ecosystem is the same name as the unit, then I can't see you ever disentangling the two. For example, talking about running Bitcoin Core, worked on by the bitcoin developers, to set up your own bitcoin node, to sync to the bitcoin network, to use to receive a bitcoin transaction, so you can hold a few million satoshis. Most people won't buy it.

I think the base unit will be bitcoin in the media and on exchanges forever, even if we do eventually reach such a price that most people talk about satoshis when transacting.

Yeap, I know the chances of sats being adopted as default is somewhat wishful thinking. One man can dream though!

[jaberwock]

This is so it came be broken down to a fraction of a fraction. Keep in mind bitcoin only has a finite about of coins to ever be minded unlike traditional fiat which can be continue to be printed limitlessly. Hopefully bitcoin continues to progress and becomes used as a currency more often so this way of being denominated is important for that factor.

That is for sure mate. The price may seem to be stagnant right now but not the progress or the adoption rates. It will only keep on growing and this would help the value of btc grow too in the future. Maybe that is also the the time that more people will use btc a currency like what they are doing with their fiats. For now, people are only using their btc for hodling or as an investment asset.

Bitcoin is a currency but only a crypto. That means, it still have some difference as when compared to fiat currencies but this shouldn't be a big issue. Btc users are already used to, on how they see btc. There is no need for us to copy what we see in fiat currencies.

[witcher_sense]

Historically, the units of a particular currency have always served as a more convenient representation of the units of weight of the commodity backing it. For example, one dollar was always equal to one ounce of silver, hence one cent was 1/100 ounce of silver. If I wanted to exchange my dollars for pounds of sterling, which, as the name suggests, represents pounds (of silver), I would have to pay 16 dollars for each pound of sterling, simply because 1 pound is 16 ounces. Unlike fiat currencies, which always require some sort of backing, bitcoin has value on its own and therefore doesn't need any weight representations and conversions. But to signify bitcoin is a divisible currency, there must be some units that will represent small values. Given that everything in the bitcoin code is measured in terms of satoshi, we can't escape usage of these units: they, like "bitcoin", have become a brand and therefore are widely recognized and accepted.

[o_e_l_e_o]

True, but that is today. Assuming that bitcoin gets more and more expensive in the future, we're going to use a lot more of the hundreds and thousands range of sats rather than millions; depending on what you're buying of course. Whereas with bitcoin, the decimal would just move further and further and would add more and more zeroes. Using sats this early is just for future proofing.

I don't disagree, but at the moment saying that 1 bitcoin is $30,000 is far more meaningful than saying 1 sat is $0.0003 or 0.03 of a cent. For people trying to buy or sell bitcoin, rather than being faced with a decimal point and extra zeroes in the amount they are trying to trade, the would instead by faced with a decimal point and extra zeroes in the price they are trying to pay.

Perhaps instead, if we want bitcoin to be the base currency, then we should be measuring other currencies against it, rather than vice versa. How about we switch the units and say that $1 equals 3,300 sats. Also makes it far more obvious how much fiat is devaluing. 5 years ago 1 dollar used to buy 60 thousand sats. Now it only buys 3 thousand sats!

[wiss19]

Honestly I do not think that it is that weird or different. The difference is that we have used x,xx method for so long that we are so used it, but why not have 8 zeros after the comma? What makes it so impossible? Bitcoin is a valuable one, meaning that 1 satoshi didn2t mean anything at all back in the day, instead it does mean something today, still very little but grew so much.

Compared to that dollar doesn't have that, it has the reverse, back in the day 1 dollar could buy you a house, then 100, then 1000, today you need like at least 60k for a proper condo, let alone a good house which would be around 100-150k and a great one would be at least 300-400k. So why need more than 99 cents, it worths nothing anyway.

[evichi]

The maximum total supply of Bitcoin is 21 million. Bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto, designed the cryptocurrency essentially as digital gold and capped the Bitcoin maximum supply to mimic the finite quantity of physical gold. Becuase of this limited supply as well as the number of people using Bitcoin, that value of Bitcoin have increased and this has led to the use of Bitcoin in fractions as it now expensive to have one full Bitcoin. As the value goes up, the number of fractions in decimal keep increasing. Satoshi represents the fractional part of Bitcoin, but it not popularly being used as a unit of Bitcoin.

[FanEagle]

To be fair, bitcoin is not used as a currency as much as it should be. Yes when we look at the volume and how much it gets sent and received per day, it may look like a big amount but most of it for investment purposes. So when you look at it that way, people do not care about the satoshi part of it and only care about how much it worths in fiat.

This is a sad reality, it should not be like that, and it should be seen as a good and loved thing, but at the end of the day we just need to accept that there is nothing we can do to change it. People will keep on using it as a way to invest and make money, hence won't care about the unit being different.

[stompix]

Example: A bag of bread in a supermarket is labeled:  
A, $2.
B, 0.00006653 BTC.
C, 66.53 µBTC.

You see, you started with the wrong assumption, that somehow in every place on this earth things end either end with a fixed value or something like 1.5 or 5.5.
Since you mentioned Japan, look at the prices here, (random google search image)

So there are a lot of 278, 248, 186, 208, 321, 1558, 1068, 1238, 1198, which doesn't seem to be a problem for 120 million people.
Next, you're totally wrong about the flat prices for bread, let's take Europe for example, go into a carrefour and you're going to see prices like 1.35, 1.48, 2.64, 1.69 regularly, I've checked my last receipt from the supermarket, it was 67.01..lol!
We could go to the extreme examples, how do people manage to do it in Vietnam where everything is in the thousands?

It's a fake problem that wouldn't bother anyone longterm.
The bigger bump in the road is that not that many are interested in spending coins they believe will be worth 10 times more after the halving, again a fake issue since you can spend your coins and with the unused fiat replenish your stash, driving merchant adoptions since they see people spending.

[kaseygriffin]

Bitcoin is also a currency, why is its unit so different from the commonly used currency units?  

Apart from the fact that you treat it like a regular foreign currency, do you feel it is different and has a reserve asset? I myself am not too bothered about the value having to be converted to something else, but essentially they have the same usability. My thinking is that if all physical goods are easily redeemed for BTC itself, converting to fiat only complicates matters. Although there are many crypto products today with numbers that are easy to imagine for life, I am not too fond of them because my own way of looking at crypto is becoming less and more ambiguous.

[sklopan]

It seems to me that this is the secret of bitcoin. It is in the fact that they began to use it in many places, they often talk about it, and as a result, its popularity and, accordingly, the price are growing.