The Sats vs Bits Battle ⚔
Happy Thursday, Dispatchers! Welcome to this week's News Rollups.
Bitcoin terminology wars are heating up as Jack Dorsey calls for rebranding to promote adoption of the largest cryptocurrency, while the Bitcoin purists are fighting to preserve a legacy left behind by Satoshi Nakamoto.
In today's News Rollups edition, we examine:
Is Bitcoin’s complicated terminology preventing adoption?
Why is Saylor's Strategy facing class-action lawsuits and short-seller attack?
Can Solana's upgrade help Web 3.0 compete with the best of Web 2.0?
Who shut down LIBRA memecoin’s investigation days after court orders?
Got questions about a hot crypto topic that you want help understanding? Ask your question using the form and our crypto experts may answer it along with a shoutout to your name in our weekly News Rollups.
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Q: Should Bitcoin ditch "satoshis" for good?
Jack Dorsey thinks so. No, not the fractional units of Bitcoin, but the term “satoshis” itself. The Twitter founder backed BIP-177, a proposal authored by software developer John Carvalho, to rebrand Bitcoin's base unit from "satoshis" to "Bitcoins".
That will flip the current system where 100 million sats equal one Bitcoin.
Under this plan, what we call 0.00002525 BTC today would become ₿2,525 Bitcoin (worth about $2.66). Meanwhile, today's "1 Bitcoin" would just be called "1 BTC."
The logic? Carvalho argues Bitcoin's decimal points confuse people and make it seem less appealing for everyday spending. "Sats is definitely the wrong term and is stopping everyday people from acquiring and spending Bitcoin," Dorsey posted on X.
This has got Bitcoin purists furious.
They argue it destroys 15+ years of education about Bitcoin's 21 million fixed supply and dishonours Satoshi Nakamoto's legacy. Podcast host Bram Kanstein said: "‘Please send me 1200 BITCOINS for this Apple’. Totally not confusing. Ant brain proposal."
Carvalho, the author of the proposal, isn't fazed by the backlash: "The proposal is entirely rational, thus difficult to refute, so instead we get emotional displays." He believes the change is "inevitable" and just needs time to grow on stubborn Bitcoiners.
Do you think terminology is keeping people away from buying Bitcoin? True Hodlers will hodl anyway, no?
Q: Is Saylor's Strategy sailing in troubled waters?
The Bitcoin treasury champion, Michael Saylor, is facing a class-action lawsuit from investors who claim he misled them about the risks of his fair-value accounting switch.
The lawsuit centres on Strategy's move to fair-value accounting in January, which means Bitcoin price swings now hit quarterly earnings directly. When Bitcoin dropped, Strategy reported a brutal $4.2 billion Q1 loss despite holding 576,000 BTC worth $62+ billion today.
Investor Anas Hamza claims Strategy "overstated" profitability while downplaying volatility risks, focusing on rosy metrics like "BTC Yield" instead of warning about potential massive losses from the accounting change.
Strategy responded in a filing saying it intended to “vigorously defend against these claims.”
What’s worse? Legendary short-seller Jim Chanos, who was the first to call out fraud at Enron more than two decades ago, is going all short on Strategy and long on Bitcoin.
"They're selling retail investors the idea that they should value [Strategy] at a premium" to Bitcoin itself, he told CNBC. His play? Short Strategy stock and use the proceeds to buy actual Bitcoin.
The irony: Chanos says he is doing "exactly what Michael Saylor is doing" - selling Strategy stock to buy Bitcoin, except he's betting the company's premium will compress over time.
With 100+ copycat companies following the same playbook, the legal scrutiny was probably inevitable.
What’s baffling though is investors suing Strategy for the losses they made when BTC slipped in Q1. What else would happen if one’s betting on a company whose product gives investors exposure to a leverage on Bitcoin — both its rewards and risks?
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Q: Is Solana's “Merge” moment here?
On paper, yes. Solana researchers just proposed the blockchain's biggest upgrade ever, slashing transaction finality from 13 seconds to 0.1 seconds, making it 100x faster.
Named "Alpenglow" after Swiss mountaintop light, this consensus overhaul could enable "apps that feel like TikTok, payments that settle instantly, games without lag," according to the Solana Foundation.
The researchers claim Solana would be "much faster than all the other blockchains". So fast that it could give some of its fastest competitors such as Wall Street markets a run for their money. Some suggest Nasdaq's days as the financial hub are numbered.
The upgrade could launch by end of 2025 after the community approves it. Recent Solana governance has been rocky – a tokenomics proposal just failed after late opposition votes.
But researcher Roger Wattenhofer sounds confident: "This is going to be the new consensus protocol of Solana." He's got backing from co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko and key developers.
If successful, Alpenglow could be Solana's "Merge" moment – except instead of going green like Ethereum, Solana's going for pure speed to compete with Web2 infrastructure.
The Crypto Comic 🎭
CFTC commissioner Kristin Johnson joined her colleagues — Summer Mersinger, Christy Goldsmith Romero, and Acting Chair Caroline Pham — as the fourth one to announced departure plans from the agency. This will potentially leave Trump's nominee Brian Quintenz running a one-man show at crypto's likely primary watchdog.
Dispatch Decoder 👨🏽🏫
What do rising 10-year Treasury yields mean for crypto?
The 10-year Treasury yield – currently at 4.585% in the US and 1.57% in Japan – is essentially the "risk-free" return investors can get from lending money to the government for a decade.
When these yields rise, it creates a powerful competitor for crypto investments. Think about it: why take the volatility risk of Bitcoin when you can get a guaranteed 4.58% return from the government?
Rising yields typically hurt crypto in three ways:
Capital flight: Money flows out of risky assets like crypto into safer bonds
Higher borrowing costs: Crypto platforms and traders face expensive financing
Stronger dollar: Makes crypto more expensive for international investors
Recent market action proves this relationship.
When the 30-year Treasury spiked to 5.09% on May 21 – the highest since 2007 – Bitcoin failed to hold its $109,000+ all-time high and stocks crashed 800+ points.
There’s a catch though. Crypto can also benefit as a hedge against the economic uncertainty that drives yields higher. Some traders view rising yields as a sign of a "cracking system," making decentralised alternatives more appealing - just like we saw Bitcoin smash the $111,000 mark later on May 21.
The bottom line? Rising Treasury yields create signal market uncertainties, but they also reinforce Bitcoin's narrative as an alternative store of value when traditional finance gets shaky.
Under the Radar 🔎
Milei shuts down LIBRA memecoin investigation
Argentine President Javier Milei just dissolved the task force investigating his February LIBRA memecoin promotion – conveniently days after a judge ordered his bank records unsealed.
The Solana token Milei endorsed had crashed from a $5 billion market cap to near-zero in what rocked the memecoin and broader crypto ecosystems alike, leaving $251 million in losses for traders across 13,000 wallets.
Read: When Presidents Play With Memes 🏛️
Politically, Milei's timing is smart – he's riding high after stabilising the peso and winning a capital election. "No better moment to prevent bad info from being released before midterms," said James Bosworth, founder of risk analysis consultancy Hxagon.
So much for an accused handling and managing the investigation probing the alleged crime?
LIBRA holders were the happiest - the token almost doubled on the news before correcting and settling down with 30% gains.
That's it for this week's News Rollups.
See ya, next Thursday.
Until then … stay curious.
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