Bitcoin Core developers propose to abolish "Satoshi" units and remove decimal points, sparking community controversy

While the Bitcoin community was busy optimizing the user experience, launching escrow solutions, lobbying regulators, and wooing institutions, core developer and Synonym CEO John Carvalho proposed a simpler solution: abolish the "satoshi" unit and remove the decimal point, in order to lower the threshold for newcomers to cognition. In his December 2024 BIP proposal, he advocated that the 100 million "Satoshi" of 1 Bitcoin split be directly defined as "Bitcoin". For example, a transaction currently displayed as 0.00010000 BTC would be displayed as 10,000 BTC in the new system, completely reinventing the "Bitcoin millionaire" metric.
The move quickly sparked controversy. Opponents joked with "pizza theory": if each slice of pizza is called a "whole", it needs to be ordered eight at a time to meet the demand, alluding to the absurdity of unit expansion. More community members worry that if the total is "inflated" from 21 million to 2.10 billion billion, it will shake the core foundation of the bitcoin scarcity narrative. However, Carvalho's proposal may be quietly gaining strength. On April 25, he wrote on the X platform: "Although still a minority, more and more people are accepting the idea of calling the smallest unit of bitcoin'bitcoin 'and eliminating the decimal point."