Joe on Nostr: What does a Sats future in retail look like? Ask yourself this, in 10 years what use ...

What does a Sats future in retail look like?

Ask yourself this, in 10 years what use will there be for the word Bitcoin on menus? On receipts? On store signs? On catalogs? On e-commerce sites?

The word Sats can do everything. Calling them "Bitcoin Sats" is redundant. Showing a price in both units—X Sats and also 0.00000X BTC —is a waste of space, not to mention the ugly and human-brain un-parsable mess of zeros. Small businesses don't waste space. Space is money. Prices will be shown in Sats alone.

If you believe in proof of work, and you apply that to words, then the word Bitcoin in these retail contexts isn't doing any work. It's not clarifying anything. It’s not adding any meaning. Semantically, it’s a complete waste of space. At best it's a branding crutch, and one that'll last but a few years. until the word Sats stands alone.

The word (or symbol for) dollar is not a waste of space in these contexts. It’s doing a job. It’s telling you how much the thing is in a way that your human brain can parse. This can of soup is one dollar and fifty cents. So comparing Bitcoin and Sats to Dollars and Cents is (usually) purposefully misleading. Nothing in the supermarket will be priced at one Bitcoin and whatever number of Sats.

The word Bitcoin will remain in use in trading contexts, primarily. But small retail, sorry, no proof of work. Humans weed out words not doing anything. It takes years but it happens. We weeded the word "sterling" out of "pound sterling" after it stopped providing the semantic value that it once did.

If people who are in favour of Sats come out and say they're cool with the word Bitcoin having no job at all in future retail contexts then that’s cool. But that is the thing to acknowledge. And in 20 years there will be people saying: "I kinda miss when we called it Bitcoin. Now it seems like everywhere it's all just Sats. My niece, you know, she doesn't even know what Bitcoin is."