The proposal to redefine the Satoshi unit has sparked controversy in the Bitcoin community.

PANews reported on April 27 that while the Bitcoin community is busy optimizing user experience, launching custody solutions, lobbying regulators, and attracting institutions, core developer and Synonym CEO John Carvalho proposed a simpler solution: to abolish the “Satoshi” unit and remove the decimal point to lower the cognitive threshold for newbies. In the BIP proposal for December 2024, he advocates directly defining 1 Bitcoin split into 100 million “Satoshis” as “Bitcoin”; for example, a transaction currently displayed as 0.00010000 BTC will be shown as 10,000 BTC in the new system, fundamentally reshaping the measurement standard for “Bitcoin millionaires.” This move quickly sparked controversy. Opponents mocked with the “pizza theory”: if each slice of pizza is called a “whole”, one would need to order eight at a time to meet demand, satirizing the absurdity brought by unit inflation. More community members are concerned that if the total supply expands from 21 million to 21 billion billion, it will undermine the core foundation of Bitcoin’s scarcity narrative. However, Carvalho’s proposal may quietly be gaining momentum. On April 25, he posted on the X platform: “Although still a minority, more and more people are beginning to accept the idea of calling the smallest unit of Bitcoin ‘Bitcoin’ and eliminating the decimal point.”