The developers of Samourai wallet published a blog post on September 28 in which they noted it’s “fundamental” that cryptocurrency users understand that when they “participate in the Bitcoin economy”, they are only transacting with BTC “and nothing else.”

As a result, the Samourai wallet team wrote that they’re saying “farewell to fiat” as they’ve decided to remove bitcoin to fiat conversions from the latest version (0.98.97) of the digital currency wallet. Launched in 2015, the developers of the Samurai wallet had been providing BTC conversion rates because they felt that users “weren’t ready” to “give up thinking in fiat terms.”

However, after “noticing a disturbing trend” in 2017 that saw financial data providers, crypto influencers, news outlets, and “innocent” users refer to BTC transactions in terms of USD, instead of BTC, the developers of the Samourai wallet concluded: 

We are now nearing the end of 2018 and realize that users will never be ready.

Samourai Wallet Developers

“Malicious Propaganda”

The crypto wallet provider acknowledged that “thinking in terms of fiat currency” was something most users were quite familiar and comfortable with as it’s what they’ve been transacting with before the fairly recent introduction of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

“This is precisely the reason” they’ve removed the crypto-to-fiat conversion “crutch” from the latest version of their wallet, the Samourai team noted. Notably, the company realizes it may even lose some of its customers because of the change, however, it will prevent bitcoin cash (BCH) promoters like Roger Ver from “maliciously spreading propaganda to further [their] agenda”, the Samourai developers claim.

The crypto wallet provider’s team noted that Ver had been tweeting to his 552K Twitter followers that BTC transaction processing fees had “skyrocketed to $55/TX” – which has led to a great deal of confusion among newcomers as they struggle to differentiate between fiat and crypto-based transactions.

Now available on the Google Play Store (ver 0.98.87) “for testers”, the Samourai wallet supports 12 different languages including Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, English, among others.

Still “Early Days” For Bitcoin

The wallet developer’s post also explains that the smallest countable unit of bitcoin is “satoshi” (abbreviated as “sat”) and that 1 sat equals 0.00000001 BTC.

Although the developers of the Samourai wallet may have legitimate reasons for choosing to remove fiat conversions from their bitcoin wallet, there may be other ways to bring more clarity as to what BTC transactions entail.

As prominent bitcoin advocate and former Google engineer, Vijay Boyapati, explained, bitcoin is still a very new form of currency. Any new type of currency first has to become a reliable store of value (SoV) before it can function effectively as a medium of exchange (MoE). Therefore, it is still “early days” for bitcoin and it might be better to continue to provide fiat conversions for the cryptocurrency as it may still take several years before they are better understood and reach mainstream adoption.