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@ Joe working on B2B
2025-05-20 17:30:04
> 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.