It’s time to admit it: there are only 2.1 trillion Bitcoins

If the above statement offends you, you may not have read the Bitcoin source code.

Of course, I’m sure you’ve heard that there are 21 million bitcoins; and this is true, the Bitcoin protocol allows only “21 million bitcoins” to be created, but these larger denominations can be subdivided into 100 million subdivisions. units each.

Call them what you want, there are only 2.1 trillion monetary units in the protocol.

This dollars and cents differential has long been debated: in the time of Satoshi, the creator of Bitcoin, the dual conventions, that Bitcoin had a majority denomination and a smaller unit, was not a big concern. There were questions about whether the software would work and bitcoin They were so uselessselling them wholesale was the only rational option.

Repeating this debate is GDP 21Qa proposal for Bitcoin users written by John Carvalho, founder of Synonym, creator of the Pubky Social Media Platformand tenured contributor whose work dates back to the days of the influential Bitcoin asset collective.

In short, the BIP proposes that network actors (the various wallets and exchanges) change the way Bitcoin denominations are displayed, and that the smallest unit of the protocol be called “bitcoins”, instead of ” bitcoins”.satoshis”, as they have been commonly called.

Here are the details of the BIP:

Redefinition of the Unit:

• Internally, the smallest indivisible unit remains unchanged.
• Historically, 1 BTC = 100,000,000 base units. Under this proposal, “1 bitcoin” is equivalent to that smallest unit.
• What was previously called “1 BTC” now corresponds to 100 million bitcoins according to the new definition.

Terminology:

• The informal terms “satoshi” or “sat” are deprecated.
• All references, interfaces and documentation MUST refer to the base integer unit simply as “bitcoin”.

Display and format:

• Applications MUST present values ​​as whole numbers without decimals.
• Example:
• Old screen: 0.00010000 BTC
• New screen: 10000 BTC (or ₿10000)

As expected, the debate around the BIP has been hostile. For one thing, it is not a technical BIP, although it is not a requirement of the BIP process. Suffice it to say that it is perhaps the most general BIP that has been proposed under the BIP process to date, as it deals primarily with market conventions and user onboarding logic, not with any changes to the software rules.

However, I must say that I find the proposal convincing. Nik Hoffman, our news editor, does not and prefers to stick to market claims.

However, I think the proposal raises relevant questions: why should new users be forced to calculate their Bitcoin balances using only decimals? Surely this has the adverse side effect of making trade more difficult; It is simply the antithesis of how people think and act today.

Also, in terms of savings, at a price of $100,000 BTC, it’s not exactly compelling to think that you could spend an entire year earning 1 BTC, although that may be the case.

In fact, there have been several debates for all types of units (mBTC, uBTC) that play with the dollars and cents convention, but Carvalho here wisely skips to the end, preferring to simply rip off the band-aid. With 1 dollar you would buy 1,000 bitcoins according to your proposal.

What do I like here? I discussed it during a meeting in Lugano. debate on the topic in 2023is that it maintains both the largest BTC denomination and the smallest unit, now bitcoins. Both are important and fulfill different functions.

My argument then was that having a larger denomination like BTC (100 million bitcoins) is important. If there was no “BTC unit”, the press and financial media would be faced with considering that “1 bitcoin” is still worth less than 1 cent.

How much coverage and general interest do we think there would be? I bet not much.

In this way, BIP 21Q is an approach that combines the best of both worlds.

The financial world, the press and the media can continue to defend the meteoric rise in value of “BTC”, while everyday users can ditch the decimals and complex calculations, trading the only real unit of Bitcoin that guarantees its existence in perpetuity .

This article is a Carry. The opinions expressed are entirely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.