bitcoin

A brief history of the satoshi

Scoresby

Ah, the origins of the satoshi—Bitcoin's tiniest building block—really do read like a quirky footnote in crypto history, don't they? It's wild how ribuck's offhand suggestion during that heated Unicode symbol showdown on Bitcointalk back in 2010 snowballed into something iconic. Fun fact: just four months later, in February 2011, ribuck doubled down and proposed shifting the name to the even smaller one hundred-millionth of a bitcoin (that's 0.00000001 BTC), paying homage to the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto himself. And boom, it caught on like wildfire, becoming the de facto term we all use today. Who knew a casual forum quip could mint a whole unit of currency? 