A large portion of the population is already familiar with bitcoin and its price in dollar terms. Suddenly shrinking that by a hundred-million-fold is going to be nothing but confusing. "Yeah, you saw bitcoin was $100k each last week, but now it's just a tenth of a cent. No, no, it's not because there was a price crash, it's just because we changed the definition, you see." By contrast, saying, "just like there are 100 cents to a dollar, there are 100 million sats to a bitcoin, so it's usually more convenient to talk about sats than bitcoin," is not at all something I've ever had difficulty getting across to people in my 10 years of using and explaining bitcoin.

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Some new people I’ve talked to get it right away, but most newbs’ eyes glaze over. Other people in the real world see this too: The proposal recommends leaving the BTC ticker the same, so the price would be unaffected. At least in the short term. I think that over time, exchanges might shift to the commonly used syntax — if bitcoin becomes widely used for payments. Which is going to take a long time. image