in what ways is the current symbol not working for Bitkit?
Seeing a balance of ⚡ 502 000 implies that all the funds are spendable on Lightning, even if they're not (which's the case for wallets like Bitkit that also support on-chain balances). Lightning might not be the main method for transacting bitcoin in the future, so associating "sats" so closely with it is limiting.
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You could make the UX better by treating onchain and LN balances as a unified balance and allow spending from both.
But I'm sure this symbol is the bigger UX problem affecting users of Bitcoin /s
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You could make the UX better by treating onchain and LN balances as a unified balance and allow spending from both.
That doesn't solve the overarching problem. What about wallets that don't have Lightning?
But I'm sure this symbol is the bigger UX problem affecting users of Bitcoin /s
The lack of a sats symbol is certainly not the "bigger UX problem affecting user of Bitcoin". We don't believe that. There are many problems to be solved, and we can work on solving all of them!
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what about wallets that don't support LN
Small UTXOs are becoming dust due to high fees. But we need another symbol to represent those units which are now unspendable /s
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Small UTXOs are becoming dust due to high fees. But we need another symbol to represent those units which are now unspendable /s
There are many problems to be solved in Bitcoin, and a sats symbol is not the only one or the main one, but it's one of them. Many Bitcoiners are working on solving different, independent issues. That's the beauty of decentralization. There's no Bitcoin Foundation dictating which issue of the roadmap should be prioritized!
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100 sats \ 0 replies \ @kr 31 Jan
good point
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @ek 1 Feb
Seeing a balance of ⚡ 502 000 implies that all the funds are spendable on Lightning
I think that won't matter in the long run.1 A lot of words we use don't really make sense but words change their meaning all the time.
Most people won't even know about lightning. They'll just use the symbol without thinking about it. And if anyone asks why we use a lightning bolt as the currency symbol, we'll just respond with: "For historical reasons."
Footnotes
  1. I don't even think it implies that. It's already just a symbol for sats for me.
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That might happen in the future, yes, but today that's still a source of confusion for users of wallets that have on-chain and Lightning.
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Another issue is that the ⚡ Unicode symbol gets rendered as an emoji when typed. A currency symbol that is an emoji will never be taken seriously. We could use ϟ instead, but it looks Harry Potter's scar reversed. There's ↯ as well, but it's too bearish.
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