What can you buy with a virtual pocketful of satoshis? Why, anything and everything. Whatever goods or services you can purchase with BTC or BCH you can purchase with their smaller units of account – the satoshi, or 'sat' for short. With 100 million of them to every bitcoin, satoshis are as divisible as they are versatile. But for satoshis to thrive, the Bitcoin community needs to start using them to price products. Only then can the simple sat start to shine.

Bitcoins Are Scarce But Satoshis Are Plentiful

Digital scarcity is all relative. It's drummed into us that there will only ever be 21 million bitcoins, and thus the vast majority of people will never own a whole BTC or BCH. This isn't a problem, since each bitcoin is divisible into 100 million sats, but from a marketing perspective, this is a major issue. Most people who've heard of Bitcoin know that you don't have to buy a whole bitcoin. What they probably don't know, however, is that simply through switching from bitcoins to satoshis, it's possible to price a wide range of products, from candy bars to guitars. Before that can happen, though, there's work to be done in raising awareness of sats and their many applications.

Knowing that there will ultimately be 2.1e+15 satoshis in existence – that's 2,100,000,000,000,000 – is an interesting statistic, but one that isn't relatable to everyday use. Knowing that 25,000 sats equates to $1 at the time of publication, however, provides a firmer basis from which to begin pricing items using satoshis. The very act of referencing the U.S. dollar, however, raises a catch-22: for bitcoin and its subunits to become a pricing benchmark, they need to free themselves from the shackles of fiat currencies.

Samourai has already done so, removing fiat currency conversions from its BTC wallet altogether. Such cases are few and far between however. There are examples of companies denominating prices in millibits, better known as mBTC (1/100th of a coin), such as market data service Bitcoinity and popular BTC desktop wallet Electrum. By and large, though, only Bitcoin maximalists and altcoin traders are fully fluent in millibits, bits, and satoshis.

Stats About Sats

Satoshis are most commonly referenced as a means of calculating bitcoin transaction fees. BTC and BCH fees are commonly denominated in sats per byte. As a number of Bitcoin supporters have tried to demonstrate, however, the applications for sats needn't stop there: