Dorsey Drops Bombshell: Bitcoin’s Evolution Could Erase the ’Satoshi’ Unit

Jack Dorsey just lobbed a grenade into crypto purists’ echo chamber—suggesting Bitcoin’s scaling might make the satoshi obsolete. The Twitter/Square founder’s comments sparked instant backlash from maximalists clinging to BTC’s original fractions like goldbugs hoarding Krugerrands.

Here’s the irony: A currency designed to transcend central banks now faces internal denomination drama. Lightning Network’s dominance could render satoshis irrelevant—too small for real-world use when fees get measured in millisats. Meanwhile, Wall Street still can’t decide if Bitcoin is digital gold or a payment rail.

Funny how the ’anti-fiat’ crowd gets territorial about their sacred cow’s smallest unit—while TradFi quietly tokenizes everything that isn’t nailed down.

Proposal To Ditch Satoshis As Bitcoin’s Base Unit

The immediate backdrop is the improvement proposal 177 (BIP 177), introduced on 23 April by Synonym CEO and developer John Carvalho. The document WOULD “redefine the commonly recognized ‘bitcoin’ unit so that the base unit becomes the primary reference unit,” eliminating the customary eight-decimal presentation and deprecating the term “satoshi.” Internally nothing changes; what users now know as 1 BTC would display as 100 000 000 bitcoins, while wallets could offer a legacy toggle for backwards compatibility.

Carvalho argues that imposing an integer-only view cleans up education and user interfaces by exposing the protocol’s true nature: “Bitcoin’s ledger represents values as integral base units. The decimal point is merely a human-imposed abstraction.” Supporters say that ditching decimals removes the psychological hurdle that drives newcomers to cheaper-looking altcoins and that the MOVE resembles a “stock split” rather than a monetary debasement.

Resistance has been fierce. Swan chief executive Cory Klippsten, Byte Federal product director Michelle Weekley and consultant Magdalena Gronowska all warn that multiplying apparent supply from 21 million to 2.1 quadrillion “bitcoins” would sow chaos. Weekley counters that “people understand cents in a dollar, they will understand sats in a Bitcoin,” while Gronowska fears some users “could think that Bitcoin abruptly crashed from its current price of around $100,000 and that its supply has massively inflated.”

Robin Linus, creator of the Bitcoin VIRTUAL Machine (BVM), notes that the currency’s pseudonymous inventor anticipated such a shift. In a 6 February 2010 Bitcointalk post, Satoshi Nakamoto wrote: “If it gets tiresome working with small numbers, we could change where the display shows the decimal point… Same amount of money, just different convention.”

The denomination debate is hardly new: Jimmy Song’s 2017 BIP 176 proposed “bits” (one-millionth of a BTC) as a friendlier frontage, but Carvalho dismisses that as retaining a “layered decimal approach” and “shifting complexity rather than eliminating it.”

No Bitcoin consensus-critical change has been activated since the Taproot soft fork in November 2021, and BIP 177 would likewise require only interface, not protocol, updates—yet a norm change still depends on widespread voluntary adoption by wallets, exchanges and payment processors.

For now the market shows little concern. Bitcoin changed hands at about $102,786.