Satoshis are cool
I've been seeing more and more wallets adopting @BitcoinErrorLog's 1 Bitcoin = 1 sat notation aka BIP 177 and it makes me a little sad. I really like the terms
satoshi and sats -- they're funky and feel more human than bitcoin or btc, and they emerged organically...At least, that's always been my assumption. I realize I don't have much of an idea who first proposed the term and how it caught on.
Who came up with the idea to use satoshi?
The Bitcoin wiki has a nice little page on the term. The wiki says that ribuck first proposed it as a nickname for a hundreth of a bitcoin on 15 November 2010. The suggestion was really just an aside in a long debate about what should be the official unicode character for Bitcoin.
1 satoshi is 1 millionth of a bitcoin? or a thousandth?
One month later, the idea really hadn't gotten any traction, but ribuck still liked it. This time ribuck suggests one satoshi being equal to a millionth of a bitcoin.
satoshis or austrians?
In February of the next year (2011) ribuck still likes satoshis (although he's open to calling the pieces of a bitcoin "austrians" too).
This time the community seems to get it. jon_smark likes satoshis (austirans not so much).
"Granted, speaking of millicoins and microcoins could get tiresome, so choosing nicknames for the multiples and submultiples is a good idea. I agree that "Satoshi" is a good candidate, but I'll have to disagree with you on the "Austrian"... :-)"
Luke jr and the imperial system
As with any internet debate worth its salt, there is always a healthy dose of contrarian debate.
In this case, Luke Dashjr enters the chat with a nice aside about how the imperial system is actually much better than the metric.
100 million satoshis in a bitcoin
While ribuck was the one who came up with the term
satoshi, the person who gave it its current definition was marcus_of_augustus.On 20 February, marcus_of_augustus proposes defining a satoshi as the smallest unit of bitcoin.
"There are currently 546 trillion satoshis in existence (100 million satoshi = 1 bitcoin), the smallest denomination."
And on 28 February, marcus posts about the idea of 100 million satoshis per bitcoin in a more formal way.
Look after your satoshis and the bitcoins will look after themselves.
Mass adoption
By the middle of March, users on BitcoinTalk are seem to have settled the matter.
I got an idea for a game that use bitcoin as energy resource, except you can play lot of games with just one bitcoin. Since one bitcoin equals 100,000,000 satoshis, you will spend at most 100,000 satoshis in a long paced RTS game. -kiba
No. Since Bitcoins are divisible to eight decimal places, there are 2,100,000,000,000,000 (2.1 quadrillion) base units of currency available. That's more than enough granularity, which is the only thing that matters. It doesn't matter if you only have 500 Satoshis (1 Satoshi = 1/10^8 Bitcoin) if a meal only costs 2 Satoshis. -BitterTea
There wasn't any BIP or even a vote. You might say the term emerged out of a rough consensus.