Bringing ₿ to the World

Bitcoin has a symbol – let’s use It.

Written by Mat Balez.

In this edition, newly minted Spiral PM Mat Balez makes the case for adopting the ₿ symbol to describe all bitcoin quantities. Some may call it an annoying conversation, which may be right, but often in bitcoin, just as in life, it’s okay and maybe even essential to have annoying conversations. You should see what our off-sites are like.

A big part of product work is helping to build the world you want to see.

That means you have to be a bit of a futurist: extrapolate from here, imagine what’s coming, build conviction for what should be, and then work backwards to help achieve it.

When it comes to bitcoin, I like to imagine a world where bitcoin has become everyday money for everyone around the world. That will mean bitcoin becoming a global means of exchange and unit of account. Millions of merchants will state their prices as bitcoin quantities. Billions of people will spend in bitcoin. It will be a good thing: payments will be neutral, cheap, easy and fast. Both online, and IRL.

But have you ever stopped to think about how and where bitcoin—the brand, the word, the symbol, the concept—will appear in this future?

Let’s play it out.

Presently, almost anywhere you go or what service you use, bitcoin amounts are shown in one of two ways—often within the same app:

• Decimal quantities, usually for larger amounts and shown with BTC, are denominated in 100,000,000 ‘base units’ of the bitcoin protocol, like 0.625 BTC. These are often used for the inflation-resistant traditional savings use case.

• Integer quantities, usually for smaller amounts and shown as “sats” or “satoshis” or the sat symbol ☰, denominated in single ‘base units’ of the bitcoin protocol. Like 25,750 sats. These quantities are often used for spending & payments use cases.

It has become this way for very bitcoin-ey reasons: organic evolution over time, grassroots support by wallet builders, emergent decentralized consensus, and so on. This is The Way.

Yet, suppose you continue to play things out and bitcoin adoption spreads: the price of bitcoin rises, payments become the most frequent use case, daily spending wallets become the dominant way to use bitcoin, and then bitcoin, the brand, will have receded from view almost entirely. Product UIs will show “sats.” Prices everywhere will be “sats.” To the extent that visible quantities form the most visible interface to touching, seeing, and feeling bitcoin, our current path leads to a “sats-branded” world rather than a “bitcoin” one.

Is this inherently worse?

I think it would be inherently sad.

It would mean we’ve foregone this incredible asset that the bitcoin community has created—the massive brand recognition that bitcoin currently enjoys worldwide—and we’ve let it fall by the wayside.

But the bigger problem by far is that approximately no one in the world today knows what “sats” are. Poll your non-bitcoiner friends. Bitcoin yes. Satoshis no. This will probably be true for everyone you talk to. Go on, give it a shot.

So pushing along our current path means forcing this entirely unnecessary learning burden upon all new users coming to bitcoin.

It creates confusion and requires work to figure it all out, including:

• Learning that “sats” are not a shitcoin but the same asset as bitcoin

• Avoiding the scammy Google links pedaling fake “sats”

• Getting that there are 100M “sats” in a bitcoin

• Understanding that you can spend your sats anywhere bitcoin accepted by merchants

More learning = more friction = higher bounce rate = slower adoption.

Think of it as a tax on adoption. Yet, it’s a tax we can easily avoid…

We can use the ₿ symbol everywhere we currently use “sats”.

Specifically, we can adopt the following convention for showing any bitcoin quantities in text: (1) use only the integer format, (2) label it with the ₿.

Instead of “0.6250000 BTC,” your savings would be shown as ₿62,500,000 or ₿62.5M.

Instead of “4,585 sats,” your latté would cost ₿4,585.

It’s cleaner. It preserves the bitcoin brandmark alongside prices forevermore. Best of all, it makes it crystal clear that the asset you’re using, sending, or receiving is bitcoin.

And it’s easy to do.

For instance, here’s how we might adapt a notional wallet screen from the Bitcoin Design Guide:

Bitkit was one of the first to do it last year, then Boardwalk Cash did it too, then BIP-177 formalized the thinking, and now Square is marketing it in their new POS. Blitz recently announced that they’re providing the option in their web wallet. A wild Wallet of Satoshi was even spotted making the change. People are talking. Grass roots are grass rooting.

But I get it. You may think the idea is absurd. I did too at first for the following reasons:

• Feels wrong

• The sats ship has sailed

• Seems crazy to even be talking about

• Sats work fine, why waste time even discussing this?

But then you forecast forward, consider the rise of bitcoin payments (from effectively zero today to mass adoption one day), and it starts to seem just a smidgen less crazy. And then you see it in some mockups, and this ₿-only format does, grudgingly, look pretty nice. Soon you’re kind of wincing anytime you see decimals or “sats” in your products.

The ₿ is one of those things you can’t unsee.

So let’s walk through a few of the questions that naturally arise.

What about spoken language?

How will people refer to these ₿ quantities verbally?

It’s much harder (if not impossible) to codify or even advocate for standardizing verbal language use. By its nature, spoken language evolves rapidly and colloquially and is highly relevant to the community in which it evolved.

• Some bitcoin OGs will continue to say their coffee costs “five thousand sats.” Great! Have at it. A well-earned way to flex your OG-ness.

• Others will say “five thousand bitcoin.” Great! It’ll be the most natural thing in the world for new users.

• Still others might shorten it to “bits” or “coins” or “bitties.” Maybe kilobits and megabits will even become common shorthand? Who knows. Not us. Never us.

Language evolves. It’s evolving right now, always, and will continue to forever.

The key thing from my perspective is to try and align on the best, most consistent convention for expressing quantities in product UIs and text, and let culture do the rest.

What about the price?

Nothing changes.

The price of bitcoin and its journey from being worth nothing to being worth more than $100K is probably the most important piece of pop culture and marketing that exists for bitcoin. It’s the reason the world has tuned in at all.

Global consciousness and culture will continue to talk about the bitcoin price denominated in its present-day form.

The standard price ticker BTC, widely adopted across exchanges, remains the same. We simply adopt the definition 1BTC = ₿100,000,000 and run with it.

And so, the world can and should continue to refer to the bitcoin price in BTC terms, just as it does today. Nothing to see here.

What about the 21M meme?

Similarly, nothing really changes.

The scarcity of bitcoin is foundational. It mustn't change either in fact or perception.

No new bitcoin is being created by merely changing how we annotate bitcoin quantities.

To the extent we need to talk about the total amount of bitcoin that exists or will exist, we can continue to use “BTC” to label and describe the quantity representing 100,000,000 base units. So the meme is the same, just written as “21M BTC”.

And since approximately no one in the world knows anything about the existing 21M meme (again, ask your non-bitcoiner friends), there won’t be any confusion. IMO we can (and should) tweak how we talk about things to focus more on the fact that matters more than the exact quantity itself: bitcoin is absolutely scarce and that will never change.

Won’t people make costly mistakes?

No, I don’t think anyone will accidentally mistake ₿4,585 with 4,585 BTC and send $496M from their mobile spending wallet to pay for their coffee.

The 8-orders-of-magnitude difference in value between a BTC and a ₿ means such mistakes are effectively impossible.

However, fund loss and user error are not things to take lightly, so I would love to hear about any legitimately confusing scenarios that may arise from this change in how we represent quantities. Send me examples at @matbalez and I will study each one carefully.

After all this, you may still be a ₿-disrespector.

That’s okay. I respect your disrespect. It’s healthy for everything and everyone in bitcoin to resist change.

But it’s also healthy to keep an open mind, particularly when thinking about the 7.8 billion people in the world who do not yet have bitcoin, and doing what’s best to welcome them into the fold. So even if you hate it, I say sit with it for a while. Let it marinate.

At the end of the day, I’m not making this decision. Block or Spiral isn’t making this decision. A shadowy group of super coders or designers is not making this decision.

This discursive blog post is just my own personal product-ey stake in the ground. It is but one tiny part of the emergent decentralized consensus-building process that will result in one of two futures: more wallet builders and exchanges will start adopting the ₿-only format, or they will hit the ignore button and nothing will change.

The market, the universe, and the plebs, ultimately, will decide how this all shakes out.

I love that bitcoin is like this.