Did you know that ever since Ordinals became a thing on Bitcoin earlier this year some people have been digging deep and both collecting and inscribing things on what are known as rare satoshis, or “rare sats” ? (The Buzz Name for Rare Satoshis)

What is a sat(oshi)? A satoshi is the smallest unit of Bitcoin currency recorded on the blockchain. A single Bitcoin is made up of one hundred million satoshis (100,000,000) with each sat worth about 0.00000001 BTC. These smallest units has been named in collective homage to the creator of Bitcoin “Satoshi Nakamoto”.

Think of Satoshis as pennies. A penny is the smallest unit of a dollar. One Dollar ($1) can be split into hundred pennies, and this is same with other blockchain coins like ETH. The smallest unit of ETH is called a wei, which is equivalent to 10^-18 ETH. In other words, one ETH is equal to 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 wei — or one wei is equal to 0.000000000000000001 ETH.

SATS & ORDINALS

When all 21 million Bitcoin are mined, 2.1 quadrillion sats will exist. Each sat is indistinguishable from the others because every sat is equal and exchanged for equal value which makes them fungible.

Although Each sat is indistinguishable, the Ordinals protocol is a system that makes it possible to distinguish and track individual sats, a key building block to creating Bitcoin-based NFTs. When a new Bitcoin block is mined and new bitcoin are created as mining rewards, the protocol assigns a unique number to each sat based on when it was mined. Smaller numbers correspond to older sats.

As transactions occur, the Ordinals protocol tracks each sat through subsequent transactions in a “First-in-First-out” scheme. The sats identifying numbers are called Ordinals, since both the identification and tracking mechanism are dependent on the chronological order of creation and transactions. Basically, the ordinals protocol enables the identification of individual using a unique numbering system.

The Ordinals Protocol allows for the ordered identification of satoshis, the smallest subdivision of a Bitcoin, enabling each of them to have an individual identity. From that people can inscribe sats with arbitrary content, creating Bitcoin-native digital artifacts, more commonly known as nonfungible tokens. (NFTs).

Did you know a good number of people now transfer millions of bitcoin daily in search of old/rare sats that were present in historical moments of the crypto world. This is known as the now famous “Sat Hunting” (Buzz word for finding rare satoshis).

What is Sat Hunting?

The practice known as “sat hunting” can be compared to continuously withdrawing money from a bank in search of rare coins: You withdraw $50,000, keep $1 of rare coins, deposit the remaining $49,999 and repeat process of withdrawing another $50,000 in a continuous cycle. The group that holds the largest amount of rare satoshis is the Rare Satoshi Society, which has already traded more than $1 billion in Bitcoin volume in pursuit of these historical sats. They are becoming well-known for providing rare satoshis for the majority of Ordinals experiments and even sold a single satoshi for 0.5 BTC. However there are Web3 brands providing the service of buying rare sats. For example, sating.io offers services to buy rare sats of all kinds via their Marketplace.

This movement has extended to ordinal projects who refused to be left behind. For example, Doge Punk Ordinals are all minted on Pizza Satoshis. Nakamoto Whales Project, also minted a portion of its collection into rare satoshis from the first thousand mined blocks, including one mined by Satoshi Nakamoto himself. Alongside the deployment of NFTs in rare satoshis, where is also an emerging trend of historically inscribed fungible tokens (BRC-20). DAnTer, a member of the Rare Satoshi Society, recently inscribed a collection, FHAL, onto a satoshi that was mined by the legendary Hal Finney (The first person to ever receive Bitcoin) on block 78 with the purpose of democratizing access to such a historical asset for individuals. According to DAnTer, we have entered an era where one Bitcoin is no longer equal to one Bitcoin, and a satoshi becomes equal to infinity.

Bitcoin Ordinals protocol creator Casey Rodarmor also proposed a method of identifying special satoshis. It uses natural, pre-programmed events in Bitcoin evolution and states that the “first” satoshi of those events gets a name and rarity status. Below is a breakdown of the “Rodarmor Rarity Index” Or the buzz word as we know it “Sattributes”

Common: Any Sat That is not the first sat in a block

Uncommon: First sat(oshi) of each block

Rare: First sat of each difficulty adjustment period approximately, 2,016 blocks, is considered rare. One in 1.26 trillion satoshis is rare.

First Transaction: Sat from the 10 Bitcoins sent from Satoshi Nakamoto to Hai Finney in the first Bitcoin transaction ever on January 12, 2009

Epic: First sat of each halving epoch

Mythic: The mythic satoshi is the unspendable genesis sat that was created by Satoshi Nakamoto himself.

Sats & Sating

To fill in the curiosity about how these projects inscribe their collections on uncommon sats: there are buildlers on the Bitcoin blockchain that makes this possible. For example, https://sating.io makes it possible to buy rare sats for the sake of ownership and inscription on them. HTML and all file types as well as JPEGs can be inscribed on rare sats using sating.io With these emerging developments, people without rare sats are looking to purchase them. People with rare sats are also making money from selling their sats for more than its original worth. With sating.io you are able to discover whether or not a rare sat is available by simply searching through a random Bitcoin wallet address. It also supports buying all Index rarity sats via the marketplace with a feature to inscribe on them. People are known to have spent their uncommon sats unknown to them using via exchanges and current wallets (Hiro, Xverse, Unisat and all bitcoin supported wallets). However with sating.io all rare sats are auto-detected and protected to avoid spending. The process of inscribing on sats in a block is known as sating.