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@ MAHDOOD
2025-05-19 17:59:16
Sats is confusing for new people in bitcoin. Whenever I gift sats to normie friends, they ask how much bitcoin they got from me. I tell them the amount in sats because saying 0.00044444 bitcoin is a mouthful. But then I have to explain that there are 100 million sats in a bitcoin and that is also confusing for them. It’s a lot of math and just annoying to do. So I gave up and I just tell them the dollar amount in bitcoin they have. Sats were also confusing for me and it took about a year for me to get used to using sats.
The argument that sats and cents are similar is also misleading. They are technically similar but very different in practice. Cents exist two places to the right of the decimal. Sats exist 8 places to the right of the decimal. No one walks around saying I’m selling my used car for 1,000,000 pennies. That’s fucking confusing.
People can get used to sats though and I don’t think we should change it because it will create another problem: the price. The price is the major signal and changing the units will require people to look at the price differently. Even though you’re not changing the amount of sats you hold, telling people that bitcoin is $1k is a major mind fuck. The $100k milestone is now irrelevant. And what’s the point of this solution? In 20 years, will we be talking about changing the unit again? It’s dumb. Just leave it alone and go live your life. People can learn to use sats and the free market will figure itself out. When everything is priced in Bitcoin, sats will be the standard. Maybe millisats will be identical to cents in the future.