Well it’s officially 2024. I hope everyone enjoyed the holidays. I managed to take an extended vacation to the UK and South Africa.
Before we talk about the new year, let’s do a quick recap of 2023. Bitcoin ended the year up 156%, briefly topping out at $45,000 (it’s at $47,000 today!) Okay on to the new year. I’m not going to opine about the pending slew of Bitcoin ETFs poised to be approved in the very near future. There are plenty of news articles, CNBC clips, and chatter on social media channels about this. In the highly unlikely event that they don’t get approved this go around, BTC may drop temporarily. Then hundreds of thousands of small buyers (such as myself) will celebrate by buying more, and the Bitcoin bull market will continue to run well into 2025.
I am a bit curious, as a long time media/tech exec, about how many Bitcoin ETFs and/or crypto ads there will be in this year’s Super Bowl. See my blogpost in 2022 The Crypto Super Bowl
However, once the ETF launch and Super Bowl mania dies down, I predict the story for more and more BTC consumers in 2024, is going to be stacking and transacting in Sats. Sats is short for Satoshis, a unit of measurement that is one 100,000,000th of a bitcoin. We don’t tend to hear much about Sats in the media because it’s mostly been about bitcoin or a percentage of bitcoin.
Certainly with the approval of ETFs, some individuals will continue to view bitcoin as a store of value, and move a significant portion of their portfolio into BTC or an IRA via the investment vehicles available today, with more on the horizon. However, the days of acquiring a whole bitcoin through periodic small investments (e.g. $100 — $1,000) are over.
Retail consumers in 2024 need to switch their mindsets into viewing Satoshis as a medium of exchange, or as us Bitcoiners like to say practice “Stacking Sats.” Thanks to the Bitcoin layer 2 protocol Lighting Network, the daily growth of Satoshis traded in micro amounts is destined to grow exponentially in the coming years. There will be many opportunities to stack stats as a side hustle, a full time gig, or and even tipping someone in Satoshis for providing some sort of value to you.
My mindset shifted in 2019, when I started buying $5 worth of bitcoin at a time, the equivalent of a cup of coffee in San Francisco. Back then a coffee would cost you 60,000 Sats ($5 with tip). Today coffee is closer to $6–7 with tip, but no worries in 2024 BTC terms that same coffee will only cost you 15,000 Sats. (See how that works :-)
There are already lots of use cases and interesting startups popping up to help you stack sats such as satsback.com which gives you 2% in sats back for shopping at partner stores (over 10,000 mainstream retail outlets like Macys, Ulta). Imagine a reward point that inflates instead of deflates or worse expires…. it’s here! And, that’s just the beginning! Gaming sites and eBay-like marketplaces are transacting with or stacking satoshis as well.
You may think that the opportunity for owning bitcoin is over or out of reach. I’m suggesting it’s just the beginning. This trend will change how we transact and interact in the next five years as millions of people and hundreds of use cases worldwide validate business models based on stacking and transacting in satoshis.
All the best,
Jim
