How to change the narrative on BTC pricing?

I’ve been thinking recently about what we can do to change the narrative on Bitcoin pricing…

A few things I’ve noticed:

  • A lot of my friends/family seem to think that, because they can’t buy ‘a whole Bitcoin’ that it’s too late and not worth buying any at all, which is a big shame.

  • Prices for goods (on the rare instances that they’re given at all) always seem to be quoted in full Bitcoin, meaning that they’re a nightmare to mentally convert (eg a loaf of bread costs about 0.000184 btc - too many decimal places to be workable)

  • the concept of the ‘satoshi’ is known, but it’s too small to really use, as there are 100 million of them in a single Bitcoin, and around 10,000 to the dollar (that loaf of bread is worth 18,400, annoyingly and unworkably high, especially when used to describe slightly more expensive consumer goods like a night in a cheap hotel being in the hundreds of thousands of sats)

  • We need a new benchmark. A new ‘anchor unit’. Something between the two. Something in the order of 100, 1000 or 10,000 satoshi

  • the concept of the ‘bit’ (100 satoshis) isn’t so well known, and seems to never be used. Personally, I like it. At the scale between where we are currently (~$10k) and where we hope to go ($100k-$1m), the Bit seems to be a good order of magnitude to be a long term ‘anchor unit’.

  • There are a million bits to a Bitcoin, so for people who can never own a full Bitcoin (most people), they could still aim, maybe, for 100,000 Bits (currently just under $1000), which seems more respectable than ‘0.1 Bitcoin’. In USD terms though, 0.1BTC is still a lot for many, so 10,000 Bits might even be a good number for the average person to aim for, given that most citizens only have a few hundred dollars in savings, at best. Also, ‘10,000 Bits’ in savings just sounds a lot more worthwhile and respectable than having ‘0.01 Bitcoin’ saved up…

So… Firstly, I’d like to debate names for the units:

100 Sats --> A ‘bit’ (some call it a youbit), current value just under a penny. Currently a low unit, but could handle growth upwards of 2 orders of magnitude without needing to be changed. I like the name, we just need to spread usage further :slight_smile:

And the other 2 ‘anchor unit’ candidates:

1000 Sats --> Seems totally unnamed, current value just under a dime. Could be an ideal candidate if we expect to stay in the order of 10k-100k USD in the mid-long term.
10,000 Sats --> Some called it a ‘BitCent’ but this is a bad name IMHO. It’s currently valued at just under a dollar, so could be a good candidate in the short term, if we stay at this order of magnitude for long enough. It needs a better ‘common-use-name’ tho… We can do better, can’t we? I like ‘Finney’, which could be shortened to a ‘Fin’, but that could confuse people as it’s also used in ETH… Thoughts and ideas?

Secondly…

I put together a super simple proof of concept that uses live prices from the Blockchain.info API and the GroceryBear API to do 2 things:

  1. Provide a ‘flipped price’, which I believe should be our new pricing metric, which is “How many Bits does a Dollar Buy”

  2. To provide pricing, in Bits, for 3 very simple products (a loaf of bread, gallon of milk, and 1lb sirloin steak)

It’s ugly and would need a lot of work, and can be changed to accommodate the other 2 ‘anchor unit candidates’ super easily, but I wanted to get a rough concept together to see if it’s interesting to anyone that isn’t me!!

Let me know what you think / how you think it should be improved/where you stand on the ideal ‘anchor unit’.

Thanks :slight_smile:

P.S> I was close to using the ‘BitCent’ instead of the Bit (ratio is 100:1), as its value isn’t far from the dollar (currently $0.92). If someone can come up with a catchy name for this, it could be a potential candidate that would be better than the Bit right now, as it would spit out ‘intuitive prices’ that would be v similar to current prices, but it would get hard to use commonly if/when prices go to $100k and beyond… Just a thought.

P.P.S Here’s a link to a site with current common names & denominations

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A 100 million sats to a Bitcoin is a bit of an odd number I’d agree. Would’ve made more sense conceptually to use a billion.

The BTC unit is already much too large, so pricing in Satoshi’s is better. I think the most straight forward thing to do is use the metric prefix “kilo” or “kilo-sats”. At current prices this around $0.09 USD and would be $1.00 at 100k BTC. Longer term at higher price points maybe 100 sat units would be better or even single sats. The metric prefix “hecto” is kinda awkard and so is “centa-sats” unless they just get called “cents”. The inverse prefix of micro BTC might work as that’s also 100 stats.

The common prefixes are are in increments of 1000x, not 100x so this makes it more difficult.

I think to develop this topic a bit more, we need to understand why the upper limit of 21 million BTC was chosen, was it arbitrary or was there a deeper reason for it? We can also simultaneously understand why 100 million satoshis was set to equal 1 BTC.

Some light reading just now suggests that pricing everything in BTC is like pricing goods in bars of gold which is simply impractical. Subdivisions of gold are used instead to price consumer goods.

I see your point regarding
a) people thinking bitcoin is now too expensive
b) the prices of goods in BTC look strange
and i appreciate your rough concept you put together.

So no critics here on your ideas at all, just my perspective on this:
I don’t see why this is a problem at all.

This is just a psychological misconception people fall for.
It is related to the “unit of measure” you best know, which is normally the currency you are used to.
The trap here is that people think in Dollars ! But why should this be the reference value at all ?

A loaf of bread costs 18,400 satoshi. Is this a strange price ?
A load of bread is priced at 75,435 Iranian Rial or 26,180 Indonesian Rupiah.
( https://x-rates.com/table/?from=USD&amount=1.79 )

People investing in Gold don’t say their Gold is now worth more than in the past,
no, they say it’s worth the same, only the value of the dollar is now less than in the past.
Longterm investors don’t care what others think this is worth in any specific currency.

The same is for most people investing in stocks. People prefer to invest in stocks with a lower price.
They buy 100 stocks for 10 dollar each and are fine with that, but struggle to buy one stock for 1000 dollar. Basically they invested 1000 dollar in both cases, there is no differnce at all.

So basically i prefer to just have Bitcoin an Satoshi. Two names for the same thing should be enough. :slight_smile:

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I think a lot of people do this when they travel as well. When I say a Tokyo metro ride costs around 300 yen or I was paying 16,000 baht a month for my apartment in Bangkok, they always ask me: what’s that in real money or USD?

But it doesn’t make much sense to convert the prices to USD because those economies are run on yen and baht, respectively. It makes much more sense to price costs of goods and services along with salaries in the local currency.

I think with BTC, it’s a bit difficult to price anything because there isn’t a real BTC economy, yet.

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