At 0.02 cents, the humble satoshi still has a long way to go to hit parity with the cent, let alone an entire dollar.
Bitcoin (BTC) may be circling all-time highs, but a new storm is brewing around its smallest subunit, the satoshi or “sat.”
As
more first-time investors pile in to BTC, attention is once again
highlighting the fact that many still think Bitcoin cannot be divided
and is “too expensive.”
Buy Bitcoin? Too expensive
A
frequent point of debate throughout Bitcoin’s recent history, the
problem of how to solve this misconception and introduce sats to a wider
audience is now back in the spotlight.
This week, statistician Willy Woo publicly approached listings site CoinGecko with an appeal to make the tiny satoshi more visible.
“Put up a smaller unit as the default on BTC on your site and see if it catches on. Let’s start a trend,” he offered.
Woo was responding to an experience from Magic Internet Money podcast host Brad Mills, who had been told by a prospective buyer that they could not afford an entire Bitcoin.
A long way to parity?
Satoshis
are the smallest original subunit of Bitcoin, which is divisible by up
to eight decimal places. At current prices, this makes a single satoshi
worth around 0.02 cents. One dollar is worth 43 sats.
A dedicated resource
now shows how much BTC/USD must gain in order for the one sat to equal
one cent. For this to happen, Bitcoin would need to challenge the United
States’ M2 money supply cap, Woo said — Bitcoin would need to hit $1
million.
Against that backdrop, a $23,000 Bitcoin price still seems modest. Nonetheless, some currencies have already fallen to satoshi parity
of their own accord. In July, the Argentinian peso joined the Lebanese
lira in seeing one sat equal their smallest unit of account.
He further noted that beyond sats, so-called “millisats,” which exist on the Lightning Network,
could be used should the need arise. Lightning remains the most
widely-accepted best bet for Bitcoin scaling, and advances in its user
experience will allow entry-level Bitcoiners to send tiny payments for
next to no fees in the future.
This is achieved by performing
transactions off-chain and syncing them later, avoiding the need for
miner fees and congesting the Bitcoin blockchain.
source link : https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-price-must-hit-1-million-for-1-satoshi-to-reach-parity-with-1-cent
