Satoshi Switch 1.0

I've built a Chrome extension that denominates prices in BTC

Download Satoshi Switch from the Google Chrome Store here.

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In August 2023 I wrote about how people ought to denominate prices in bitcoin as much as possible, and that those who make the mental switch to do so earlier will fare all the better for it. At the time, I remarked that average house prices had risen in sterling to £286,000 but had fallen in bitcoin terms to just 14 bitcoin. As of July 2024, the average house in the UK has risen to ~£290,000, but fallen to under six bitcoin.

In London, houses are slightly more expensive, but are similarly falling in BTC terms by about ~44% per year, showing that there are clearly benefits for those who make the mental switch, and choose to denominate their lives in a currency that accretes value instead of shedding it.

That’s why I’ve built Satoshi Switch, a free Chrome extension that automatically reads price data on websites to convert them to bitcoin — the goal is to make it easier for people to measure things this way; its far better to contextualise the world using bitcoin than using sterling.

Every five minutes, the bitcoin price will be pulled from the CoinGecko API, and prices on the screen will be converted. The app is extremely simple and easy to use: the only other functionality that Satoshi Switch has is the option to toggle between denominating in BTC or Satoshis.

Intuitively, it makes sense to measure things with a finite asset. There are various ways to measure how much USD, GBP and EUR have lost value over the past 50 years, but one could conservatively conclude at least a 90% decline. How is that useful for financial planning? It’s terrible.

I hope that this app is useful for Bitcoiners. For those interested in BTC-denominated charts, I recommend this website (which is where the screenshot below is from).

So far, I’ve tested Satoshi Switch on a few different sites and it’s worked fine, but I can’t make any promises that it will work for quirkier websites with unusual scripts. I have no plans to update the app or make any changes — in fact, I think the entire thing will be completely obsolete soon anyway, as websites catering to international audiences start to natively price things in BTC. Nevertheless, should anyone wish to review the code to fork it, tweak it, audit it, or whatever, its all public and available here: Github.

Examples

Financial Times:

Rightmove:

Trainline:

LinkedIn:

Amazon:

Twitter: