Formulating some approaches when orange piling people.
Initially I would suggest that people acquire a small amount of bitcoin to start playing with.
But how can they play with it?
As it stands, there are still relatively few places that will accept bitcoin/lightning either online or in real life.
In order to promote adoption, we need to push the use of bitcoin as a medium of exchange.
The majority people people will not invest in significant amounts of bitcoin as most people don't have significant amounts to invest.
Hence they will start with small amounts.
There is little advantage in acquiring small amounts of bitcoin, as the returns over the short to medium timescales will not move the needle.
There needs to be a reason to purchase small amounts of bitcoin.
Organisations need to start accepting bitcoin as a means of payment, but with an incentive to offer discounted prices when paying with bitcoin, or premium pricing when paying with Fiat. The reduced costs of processing bitcoin/lightning payments needs to be passed onto the customer.
Once it can be seen that it's cheaper to use Bitcoin over time, in conjunction with the value of bitcoin increasing over the medium to long term, should encourage and enable people to start to adopt bitcoin more widely.
Thoughts?
In response to the recent BIP proposal to rename sats as Bitcoin.
This is supposed to address the unit bias issue, now that a single BTC is $100k.
This proposal will not work for many reasons, primarily as it breaks the narrative that there will never be more than 21 million Bitcoin. This will cause confusion, and give ammunition to those that are against bitcoin, who will say (incorrectly) that the supply has been inflated.
To address unit bias, we need to reduce the displayed cost of bitcoin to allow normal people to feel that it is affordable and within reach, whilst still keeping the only 21 million bitcoin supply factually true.
It would also be advantageous for people new to bitcoin to be comfortable with the way it is denominated. We need to move away from eight decimal places, and using the weird naming convention of thousands of Satoshis.
The simplest way to do this is to keep BTC and sats, but start representing Bitcoin in a decimalised format. The majority of the worlds population already use decimalised currency, for example:
United States: $1.00 is 100 cents
UK: £1.00 is 100 pence
Europe: €1.00 is 100 euro cents
For bitcoin, there already exists a unit called a 'bit'.
A bit is equal to 100 sats.
A bit of a bitcoin seems to be an ideal way to refer to a smaller amount of a bitcoin. We should also start using the ₿ symbol to represent bits.
So
Global Bitcoin: ₿1.00 is 100 sats
1 whole bitcoin (BTC) is still 100,000,000 sats, but is also ₿1,000,000 bits.
Exchanges could start using a USDBIT pair where at today's prices, USDBIT=$0.10
So you could go to an exchange and buy ₿1000.00 bits for $100.11
No need to change the number of bitcoin, no need to rename sats, just move the decimal place and start using bits to denominate bitcoin.
I'm sure newbies would be more comfortable saying 1 bit 25 rather than 125 satoshis, in the same way they are used to saying 1 dollar 25 or 1 pound 25.
It would also make it so much simpler to explain.
1 whole bitcoin is $100,000 but you can bits of a bitcoin. You can buy ₿1000 for just $100.
Simple.
