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17 sats \ 7 replies \ @Myshkin 13 Dec \ on: John Carvalho proposes BIP renaming sats as bitcoin bitcoin
Based proposal. And also very practical. Forget the madness of explaining what a satoshi is vs what a bitcoin is. God, people are already confused by the nature of Bitcoin (and the difference between the currency and the protocol) that we don't need additional terminology.
Bitcoin and bitcoin is enough, I agree.
Also, nobody is really going to fatfinger 10 BTC if intending to send 10 bitcoin (the old 10 sats unit). C'mon.
Based proposal.
More like freebased.
And also very practical.
Practical only for someones ego.
Forget the madness of explaining what a satoshi is vs what a bitcoin is. God, people are already confused by the nature of Bitcoin (and the difference between the currency and the protocol) that we don't need additional terminology.
People who take the time to learn about Bitcoin are not confused. People who try to laterally embrace Bitcoin as a digital dollar are already fools. I'm not being on a high horse here.
I found out about bitcoin in 2013. I even ran Bitcoin core. But I had no idea what I was doing and I gave up. I did not read the white paper. I did not research further. I was just motivated by a Slashdot post and I gave up. In 2017 I was nudged again and I said, "No." Then in 2019 at the end of the year I got interested in CrYpTo and I kept getting routed back to Bitcoin. Finally I dove in on heavy research. I read the white paper and I read Andreas M. Antonopoulos, MASTERING BITCOIN.
You can't dumb things down for people and you certainly don't need to intellectually rug pull all the work of those who are making Bitcoin easier for other people to use! That's the key. If there is no hands on experience there will be no understanding. Thousands of layer 2 products are built on Sats and mSats. Only a jackass would want to fix this.
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"If there is no hands on experience there will be no understanding."
1000% agree! Bitcoin is based on Energy and there is no way to 'cheat' energy. Either you have it (do the PoW) or you don't! That's it!! Hence the 'truth' cognate of Sat.
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I partially agree on what you said.
The idea whereby "who doesn't study profoundly bitcoin cannot be a true bitcoin user" is foolish at best. Do you understand profoundly how a car works? Do you understand so deeply chemistry to know how a specific drug is created in its details?
If you do know these things, still there are plenty of things you cannot understand. That's how constrained resources work and our attention is a constrained resource.
Bitcoin is a tool. I don't want to be an expert about something just to use proficiently the result of some experts' work. And this is how life goes about, believe it or not. Nobody is really going through the burdain of studing Mastering Bitcoin just to pay a coffee, so we need to make tools suitable for people to pay coffee even without being a technical user, which means also making the syntax suitable for their needs. Which, among other things, means also working a bit on the "marketing side" to make the bitcoin "brand" recognizable even at the fundamental unit level.
If we are so convinced that bitcoin is a tool for freedom and we believe it would be good for all humanity to adopt it, we cannot have the arrogance to say that the Crowd has the knowledge, time or resources to understand bitcoin. Realistically, 99.9999999% of people will not study it at the level of knowing that the protocol has no decimal places but only units.
Overall the proposal is not to "dumb things down for people"...John is not proposing a technical change, not proposing a consensus change, not even proposing to force anyone to adopt it.
The gist of the proposal is "Bitcoin has achieved some brand positioning with its bitcoin name, the protocol and the currency are easily recognizable basically by anyone now. Why can't we leverage that recognizability to name the basic unit after it?".
We go about crying that shitcoins get attention, but we don't want to work a bit on the Bitcoin branding to make it easier to grasp at the user level.
If we believe in the silly story that "you've to study at least 100 hours to be a true bitcoin user and I'm not going to create any compromise to make your life easier if you don't want to study it" then I don't know where we're headed.
A tool "for anyone" that is used only by 4 bastards is not "a tool for anyone" because nobody cares about it. Bitcoin shall became a tool "used by anyone", where users will have different levels of understanding of the topic. To make it "used by anyone" we need stupid-cuck-user-level communication. Which is also simplifying how we name stuff.
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I think people can 'use' Bitcoin, for example pay for things with Lightning, without knowing how Lightning or Bitcoin works. And let's face it... lightning is complicated.
Having said that... people now and likely well into the future will purchase and 'use' sats almost exclusively. When people trade their fiat money (dollars or euros) for 'sound money' like Bitcoin the units they will encounter almost exclusively will be Sats.
If and when the exchange rate of Bitcoin is 1,000,000 dollars/btc (in 10 years or so?) will people still say 'oh I can't afford a whole Bitcoin?!' No! It will be 1 sat per cent and easy for folks to understand
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Everything is complicated when your truth is built on a flimsy platform. Certainly lightning is different. It's getting easier all the time. At the same time learning anything is as the French (? not sure of this source) saying goes: "Pain is the trade going into the apprentice."
There are thousands of people trying to make Bitcoin and Lightning easier to use. The trick is that understanding the fundamentals brings you closer to being one of those thousands. As with all technology, when things go well no one is crying and when things don't work everyone is mad. Sometimes it is a matter of asking for help. I am guilty of not asking for help so I get mad and then when I am really bent out of shape I let go and take a long walk.
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I really like lightning, use it everyday and honestly I think it's a marvel.
Is it perfect? Nope. But wow if you get a few good channels setup it's cheap and quick to transact real Bitcoin.
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Thank you for extensively responding and not trolling.
Do you understand profoundly how a car works?
Yes, and you should, too! Don't drive a car unless you know how to check the tires, lubrication, fuel, cooling system and what do if you have different driving scenarios like ice, snow, flooding, sand, mud, lane changes and all three basic information that you will need when the situation comes.
Chemistry and drugs are also something that we need to understand. How do these things make us sick. Knowing that you don't know is also important. This means that by ignoring the free accessible data you are ignorant!
Changing the name of something is not education it's changing what is already in use to bring in people who will want to change things further. Like GitHub changing the term master to main in order to make people not butt hurt.
In a manual transmission there is a master and slave cylinder. That's a fact. Changing the name doesn't change the function but it obscures the function and requires memory by rote and not investigation or understanding. The slave serves the master and the master serves the slave. Understand is to be underneath supporting the idea. You don't have to agree but you understand how it works.
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