How much could the world's most expensive coin be worth? Pause for a second. Say your number out loud before reading on. It's always curious to compare expectations with reality.
Most people guess a few million. The correct answer: $18.9 million.1 That's exactly what someone paid at Sotheby's auction in June 2021 for the Double Eagle, a twenty-dollar gold coin from 1933. The US Mint struck 445,500 of these coins, but they never entered circulation. That same year, President Roosevelt signed an executive order confiscating gold, and the entire mintage was sent to the smelter.
The entire mintage, but not quite. Somehow, 13 untouched specimens survived to this day. Twelve still belong to the US government. But one is in private hands, and that's the one that sold for an astronomical $18.9 million.
The story of this thirteenth coin deserves its own movie adaptation. In 1944, King Farouk of Egypt, a passionate collector, received official permission from the US Treasury to export the Double Eagle. The coin joined his legendary collection and seemed to have found a secure home. But in 1952, a military coup toppled the king, and the coin vanished without a trace in the chaos of history.
For forty-two years, nothing was heard of the coin. Until 1996, when British dealer Stephen Fenton attempted to sell it in New York. The US Secret Service set up a sting at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel and confiscated the coin mid-transaction. Years of legal battles followed, and only in 2001 did the government agree to a compromise: this particular specimen received the status of legal private ownership. The only Double Eagle of 1933 in the world that can be lawfully bought and sold.
And here, my dear reader, it's time to evaluate this coin without the premium for rarity and history. The face value is simple: 20 dollars, not much of a shopping spree. If we assess the gold that would remain after melting, that's 0.967 ounces of pure metal, roughly $2,040 at current prices. Admittedly better: in the store we've already virtually entered, you could afford considerably more.
It turns out that in the nearly century since the Double Eagle was minted, the appreciation in gold merely compensated for inflation of the face value. What you could buy for $20 in 1944, today costs a couple thousand. Gold didn't multiply wealth, it merely preserved its purchasing power.
So where did the remaining 99.99% of the auction price come from? Not from the gold, and certainly not from the face value, but from the story behind this coin, its rarity and uniqueness. Call it intangible properties, virtual qualities, or historical significance. The label doesn't matter. What matters is this: these immaterial attributes are valued tens of thousands of times higher than the physical metal carrying them. That's what buyers were bidding on that day at Sotheby's.
And of course, the Double Eagle isn't the only coin like this. Thousands of others are valued not by the weight of precious metal but by their rarity and place in history. Collectors pay for the right to own an artifact from the past.
The rare coin market is serious business. The numismatic industry's annual turnover reaches $15-20 billion. Heritage Auctions, the largest auction house in this niche, reported $1.76 billion in sales for 2023.2
But there's a fundamental flaw in this industry. In July 2023, a hoard was discovered in a Kentucky cornfield: more than 700 gold coins from 1840-1863. Among them were previously unknown specimens of Double Eagles from the Civil War era. Yes, these are different coins, and the find didn't affect the price of our record-holder. But the precedent speaks for itself: every collector lives with the understanding that a single chance discovery can devalue their treasure.
Sunken ships, ancient ruins, hoards found in fields: they all break the illusion of rarity and uniqueness the moment they're discovered. No experts, no certificates can protect against this risk. The earth keeps its secrets and reveals them when it pleases.
But what if there existed a realm where rarity is mathematically provable, supply is fixed forever, and authenticity can be verified in a split second? The question isn't idle. Throughout its history, humanity has been infected with the collecting virus. And what, if not collecting rare money, is the quintessence of this insatiable desire?
And such a realm now exists. Alive and thriving online, with full access to a trillion-dollar market operating 24/7. Collecting money, only now digital: Rare Sats, rare satoshis on the Bitcoin network.
The rare coin market has existed for centuries. It survived wars, revolutions, the fall of empires. You'd think that after all these centuries, the industry would have honed its mechanisms to perfection. But dig a little deeper, and you discover something surprising: numismatics is stuck somewhere in the early twentieth century.
Let's start with the obvious: the market is fragmented. Europe and America are more or less connected, but Asia exists in a parallel universe. There's no unified platform like Amazon. A coin can spend years traveling from an unremarkable city pawnshop to an elite auction house, changing owners and accumulating middleman markups along the way.
Anyone wanting to sell a rare coin for a fair price should prepare for an adventure. You might need to physically cross an ocean to reach the right auction. Or spend months searching for a buyer through closed dealer networks. There's no free liquidity here. A deal closed within a month is considered fast.
And now, my dear reader, let's put ourselves in the buyer's shoes. Before us is a coin worth half a million dollars. How do we make sure it's authentic? That it's actually gold? That the year of minting matches what's printed in the glossy brochure? For all this, you need experts. That's right, more than one, to compare opinions and reduce the risk of error. Each will take their fee. Certification will take a couple of weeks at best. And even after all that, an element of uncertainty remains: experts make mistakes, and forgeries grow increasingly sophisticated.
For a newcomer, this world is sealed shut. Without specialized knowledge, without connections in the community, without understanding a thousand nuances, you'll simply get eaten alive. They'll sell you overpriced junk or buy your rarity for pennies. The barrier to entry is high, and it's built that way deliberately: insiders have no interest in transparency. Conditions that guarantee excess profits and fat commissions suit them just fine.
But all these problems pale before the main one. The Kentucky hoard isn't the exception but the rule in this market. The history of numismatics is full of such surprises. A sunken ship is raised from the bottom, and the market for Spanish doubloons collapses. Archaeologists excavate an ancient cache, and "unique" Roman aurei suddenly become less unique.
Supply in the physical world is fundamentally unpredictable. You can pay millions for a rarity, and a year later discover they found another dozen just like it. Your investment gets wiped out not because of a mistake in assessment, but simply because someone dug a hole in the right place.
The paradox of classical numismatics: an industry built on the concept of rarity can only guarantee that rarity in the present, not in the future.
And here Bitcoin enters the stage. The troublemaker and destroyer of the old order, it has spent its entire history proving that a digital asset can be more valuable than a physical one. Now it's time to reinvent collecting itself.
In early 2023, developers Casey Rodarmor, together with contributor Raph Japh, introduced the Ordinals protocol to the world. The idea was so simple yet so revolutionary that you wonder why no one thought of it earlier.
To understand the essence of the discovery, we need to dive back into the basic anatomy of Bitcoin. One bitcoin divides into one hundred million parts called satoshis, or sats for short. While physicists keep drilling deeper into the microworld, finding atoms behind molecules, subatomic particles behind atoms, then quarks and quantum fields, in Bitcoin the sat is the smallest particle. Atomic and indivisible, the very building block on which the entire blockchain stands. Every transaction, every transfer, every operation deals in sats, not fractions of bitcoin.
And here's what Casey and Raph discovered: every satoshi has its own unique ordinal number, assigned at the moment of creation. This was built into the blockchain's architecture from day one. For sixteen years, this property existed in plain sight, but no one paid attention. Satoshis were perceived as a faceless mass, interchangeable particles without individuality. When in fact, each one was unique from the moment of birth.
Casey and Raph proposed a system of rules for using this feature and described it in the Ordinal Theory Handbook3, a document that became the manifesto of a new movement. The main thesis sounded provocative: satoshis, not bitcoins, are the true unit of currency in the network. One hundred million satoshis make up one bitcoin, and each of them is unique. Each carries its own number, its own history, its own journey through the blockchain.
Imagine every coin in your wallet suddenly revealing its serial number under the right light. By that number, you could determine when the coin was minted, whose hands it passed through, what historical events it witnessed. What's more, any data could be attached to that number: an image, text, music, code. The coin remains a coin, but now it carries something greater. A message to the future.
That's exactly what Ordinals did for Bitcoin. The protocol didn't change a single line in the network's code. It simply uncovered a piece of Satoshi's legacy that had always been there and offered a way to use it.
But Casey went further than simple numbering. He developed a rarity classification system based on key events in the blockchain's life. The first satoshi of a new block. The first satoshi after a difficulty adjustment. The first satoshi after a halving. The rarer the event, the more valuable the sat.
This is where the main difference between Rare Sats and classical numismatics emerged. Determining rarity requires no expert assessment. Rarity is calculated mathematically and verified by any free blockchain explorer in a split second. It cannot be disputed or forged. Code is law, and in a decentralized system, this law cannot be broken.
In total, 21 million bitcoins will be mined, or 2.1 quadrillion satoshis. Not one more. The number of rare satoshis in each category is known in advance and will never change. No surprises in cornfields. No sunken ships with new finds.
Within months of Ordinals launching, an entire industry formed around rare satoshis. Hunters set out on their quests. Marketplaces began trading the finds. Buyers offered whole bitcoins for particularly valuable specimens. Prices for the rarest satoshis climbed into the millions of dollars.
Numismatics 2.0 was born.
To understand the rarity system, my dear reader, let's imagine the blockchain as an archaeological dig site. The deeper the layer, the more ancient the finds and the rarer they are. On the surface lie ordinary shards, billions of them. A bit deeper, you encounter interesting artifacts. Deeper still, rare coins of ancient empires. And at the very bottom, where only a few ever reach, legendary treasures await.
But before descending into these depths, let's sort out the basic mechanics. When each new block is mined, new satoshis are born into the network. Only this way and no other. The fees miners receive for including transactions in a block are paid from existing sats created earlier.
The very first 50 bitcoins, or 5 billion satoshis, were born in the genesis block when the blockchain launched. Satoshi Nakamoto mined it personally, and these coins still sit untouched in his wallet to this day. The first sat received ordinal number 0, since in programming almost everything starts from zero. That's just how it is. The second received number 1, the third number 2, and so on up to 4,999,999,999. Ten minutes later, the second block appeared with another 50 bitcoins numbered from 5 billion to 10 billion minus one. Then the third, fourth, and so on, every ten minutes for years on end.
Of course, numbers like these are hard to wrap your head around. Imagine an enormous graph paper notebook where each cell is a separate satoshi with its own number. One filled page equals one mined block: the miner's reward, called the coinbase (not to be confused with the exchange of the same name), plus the sum of all fees from transaction senders. Every ten minutes, a new page appears in the notebook.
Over the network's lifetime, nearly a million such pages have accumulated, and the ordinal numbers of new satoshis have reached astronomical values. So large that simply trying to count the zeros would make any normal person's eyes glaze over. But that's exactly what we created computers for: if there's one thing they handle well, it's big numbers. In a split second, a blockchain explorer will tell you a wallet's balance, the number of rare sats, their categories, and the complete movement history of each one. Total transparency at work.
Meanwhile, every four years the block reward is cut in half. To continue our notebook analogy, every four years, exactly half gets torn from all new pages. Initially, miners received 50 bitcoins per block. After the first halving in 2012, the reward dropped to 25. Then to 12.5, then to 6.25, and now, after the 2024 halving, it stands at 3.125 bitcoins. By 2140, the last satoshi will be mined, and the notebook will close forever.
But that's over a hundred years away. We're interested in something else: what treasures already lie in these layers, and what makes some satoshis more valuable than others? Let's find out.
The most accessible category of rare satoshis. An Uncommon Sat is the first satoshi of each new block. Every ten minutes, exactly one such satoshi is born into the world. Their current supply equals the number of mined blocks: as I write these lines, blocks have surpassed 870 thousand. By 2140, the total supply will reach approximately 7 million.
In archaeological terms, this is like finding Roman denarii. Rare, but realistic. An experienced treasure hunter with a metal detector stands a decent chance. The price of Uncommon Sats ranges from a few dozen to a few hundred dollars apiece. An excellent entry point for beginning collectors. And also for artists and creators who want to find a beautiful but affordable frame for their work.
The chapters of this book are also published on Uncommon Sats with an additional rarity attribute of Alpha, making them rarer still. On one hand, a beautiful and unique frame for the text. On the other, a kind of springboard for capturing reader attention, or an elegant tombstone if luck isn't on my side. But more on additional rarity attributes later.
Here the real hunt begins. A Rare Sat, not to be confused with the overall rare sats industry, is the first satoshi of a block mined after a difficulty adjustment. The network automatically calibrates itself and adjusts difficulty every 2016 blocks, roughly once every two weeks, to maintain a stable pace of new block production. This very mechanism is what makes Proof of Work a reliable system.
The current supply of Rare Sats is around 430. And the total by 2140 won't exceed 3,432. This is like Bronze Age artifacts: to find one, you need to know exactly where to dig, and even then success isn't guaranteed. Rare Sats don't appear on the open market often. The price per specimen runs into whole bitcoins.
We descend even deeper. An Epic Sat is the first satoshi of the first block after a halving. Halvings occur once every four years, meaning throughout Bitcoin's entire history until 2140, only 32 such satoshis will ever appear. Currently, just four exist.
This is pharaoh's tomb level. Finding such a satoshi by accident is impossible. They're hunted deliberately. In April 2024, the ViaBTC mining pool mined halving block number 840,000 and received the fourth Epic Sat in history. They put it up for auction, turning it into a genuine spectacle. Starting price: 1 BTC. In the final minutes of bidding, offers jumped to 20. Sold for a record 33.3 BTC.4 Imagine: 33 whole bitcoins for a single sat whose face value equals a fraction of a cent.
The buyer used this satoshi to create the rune EPIC, transforming the rarest artifact into the foundation of a new token. Same principle at work: a rare satoshi as a springboard for attracting attention to a project.
And here we enter the territory of legends. A Legendary Sat must be the first satoshi of a halving block that also happens to be a difficulty adjustment block. Two rare events must coincide in a single block.
Current supply: zero. Such a coincidence has never occurred in Bitcoin's entire history. The total supply by 2140 will be just 5. This is the Atlantis of the satoshi world: everyone knows it should exist, but no one has seen it yet.
And at the very bottom of our archaeological dig lies a single artifact. The Holy Grail of digital numismatics. The Mythic satoshi, the very first sat of the entire blockchain. Ordinal number: 0. Supply: one for all eternity.
It was created in the genesis block on January 3, 2009, and has sat in Satoshi Nakamoto's wallet ever since. No one knows if Bitcoin's creator is alive, if he has access to his wallet, or if Mythic Sat will ever appear on the market. Most consider it lost forever. The only theoretical way to access it: hacking with a quantum computer. But if that happens, the fate of one sat will be the last thing the world worries about.
Beyond the main hierarchy exists a separate category of exotic satoshis. Not necessarily the rarest, but each carries a unique story.
Vintage Sats come from the first thousand blocks, an era when Bitcoin was mined on ordinary computers and no one dreamed it would ever be worth anything. Pizza Sats were part of that famous transaction on May 22, 2010: programmer Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 bitcoins for two pizzas. The first commercial transaction in history, now celebrated as Bitcoin Pizza Day.
Alpha Sats, the first satoshi of each whole bitcoin. Omega Sats, the last satoshi of each whole bitcoin. Palindrome Sats, satoshis with mirror ordinal numbers like 12345678987654321. Each subcategory has its own connoisseurs and its own market.
The exotic sats category is beloved among artists and builders as a canvas for their creativity. The Pizza Ninjas project not only inscribed their entire collection on Pizza Sats but also created a whole gaming universe inside, accessible to every holder. Pizza Sats are especially popular, and not just because they're plentiful and cheap, but because the very act of buying two pizzas for bitcoins became a landmark day for all of crypto. It kicked off all the action we see here. And let's face it, the whole world loves pizza. But things get really interesting when categories intersect.
Take Uncommon Alpha Sats: a satoshi that is simultaneously the first in a block and the first in a whole bitcoin. In the first and second epochs, every Uncommon was automatically mined as an Uncommon Alpha, since block rewards were whole bitcoins: 50 and 25 respectively. When the reward dropped to 12.5 bitcoins after the halving, the situation changed. Whole bitcoins started getting torn between two blocks. Uncommon Alphas started appearing twice as rarely. And with each subsequent halving, this trend will only intensify.
The current supply of Uncommon Alpha sits at around 580 thousand, a third less than regular Uncommons. The future supply is capped at approximately 630 thousand, ten times less than the total supply of Uncommon Sats. The category is almost fully mined, making it particularly attractive to collectors.
The theory of rarity sounds beautiful, but let's figure out how people actually find rare satoshis in practice. After all, they're all dissolved in the general mass of bitcoins and mixed in with trillions of ordinary sats.
The simplest path: check your own wallets. Perhaps some wondrous rarity has been sitting there unnoticed. Finding exotic sats or even an Uncommon among your coins isn't as unusual as you might think.
It's the ordinary holder who risks overlooking a diamond in their wallet, casually tossing it into the sea. That's why I'm writing these lines: the more people learn about rare sats, the more will check their wallets before sending coins to an exchange. Which means some of you will definitely get very lucky.
No private keys required, no special access needed. Just copy your public address into any popular rare sats explorer and run a seconds-long scan. The most popular ones: ordiscan.com and magisat.io. But the choice isn't limited to these two, of course.
Checking your own wallets, while pleasant, is a one-time event. You either find something or you don't, and that's it. But when the true hunter's instinct kicks in, you want more. Naturally, you turn to the source of all satoshis: mining.
This path, unfortunately, is closed to most. To mine a fresh Uncommon Sat, you need to mine a block. And for that, you need your own farm with hundreds of massive ASICs and gigawatts of power. As for working in a pool, the situation is no better: rewards were split among thousands of participants, and your chances of landing a rare satoshi were negligible. Today, mining pools have already figured out the rare sats game and set aside all mined rarities in their own wallets. Some pools have already accumulated thousands of Uncommon Sats.
So for the ordinary sat hunter, the only path left is pulling sats from exchanges and other custodial services, those that store thousands of their users' coins in shared wallets. These bitcoins flow in and out, get mixed up, split into pieces. Rare satoshis inevitably get caught up in this chaos. Fortunately, exchanges don't yet distinguish sats by rarity; for them, a bitcoin is just a number on a screen.
This is where the opportunity opens up for the hunter. The algorithm is simple: deposit bitcoins to an exchange, withdraw them back, check the received sats for rarity. Repeat. Each withdrawal is like rolling the dice. Most attempts will yield only ordinary satoshis. But sometimes the withdrawal will contain something special.
And I think you've already grasped how this curious game works. The math works in favor of the patient, but the volumes hunters generate in deposits and withdrawals are truly enormous. For perspective: at the current supply, one Uncommon Sat occurs for every 2.3 billion ordinary ones. That means hunters need to withdraw around 23 bitcoins in total to get one Uncommon. Of course, in practice the distribution is uneven, and you can draw a blank ten times in a row. Or conversely, hit the jackpot on your first try. That's why sat hunters constantly monitor all known exchange wallets and start their search when they see good odds of winning.
Satoshi hunters quickly figured out which exchanges yield the best results. Old platforms with large reserves and long histories offer better odds of stumbling upon rare sats from early blocks and various vintage rarities. A separate caste of hunters specializes in sats with special numbers. Palindromes, sequences, round numbers. A satoshi with number 123456789 or 1000000000000 is worth many times more than its neighbors. It's not just technical rarity anymore, but aesthetics and the magic of numbers. Like with license plates: technically there's no difference, but people are willing to overpay for a beautiful combination, and pay handsomely for it.
But rare sats aren't just collected. They're used as the bedrock for building entire collections.
One of the first collections created on rare sats was Ordinal Maxi Biz (OMB). Creator ZK Shark, with support from developer Nullish, a pioneer in rare satoshi hunting, unearthed a rich vein of sats from Block 9. The oldest Bitcoin block whose coins are in free circulation.5 Mined personally by Satoshi Nakamoto on January 11, 2009. Every single one carries the imprint of Bitcoin's creator.
The sats unearthed from Block 9 were enough to create an entire collection, with some left over. Here's one thing about exotic sats: they often come in batches, and where you find one, a whole vein lies hidden. Rare sats, by contrast, are born in solitary splendor, sparkling in the on-chain rock like precious gems.
The Block 9 vein turned out to be golden. OMB became the first Ordinals collection featured at a Christie's auction.6 Some specimens were minted at 0.9 BTC apiece. An unthinkable price for some strange pictures, justified only by the historical value of Block 9 sats.
An even more striking example of decentralized cooperation was the Commoners project. The team decided not to collect rare sats themselves, instead inviting participants to bring their own. Each one had to find an Uncommon Sat and inscribe a special HTML file onto it. The first 10,000 successful attempts became part of the collection.
Commoners became the first 10k collection on Uncommon Sats and a vivid demonstration of the Bitcoin spirit: cooperation over centralization, active participation over buying a ready-made product.7 A project like this is simply impossible on other blockchains. The very existence of rare sats is exclusive to the Bitcoin network. Same goes for storing data on-chain rather than somewhere in the cloud.
To grasp the scale: of the 870 thousand existing Uncommon Sats, only around 30 thousand are in active circulation; the rest lie in forgotten wallets. A single collection scooped up a third of the entire available supply. Even the largest mining pools combined couldn't match that. And if they eventually do, all of them will be freshly minted sats from recent years. Commoners participants, meanwhile, found genuinely rare specimens from the blockchain's early years. Such sats are prized like aged wine.
The hunt for rare satoshis has spawned an entire subculture. Its own heroes and legends, its own tools and strategies, its own slang and memes. Some treat it as a hobby, some as an investment, some as art. But they all share one conviction: behind those ordinal numbers lies something greater than just digits.
For those not looking to become an on-chain hunter of antiquities, there's the secondary market. Marketplaces like Magic Eden and Magisat allow you to buy rare sats directly. Here you can find everything: from popular Uncommons to legendary artifacts priced in whole bitcoins. Buyers range from collectors and artists to hedge funds looking to invest in the Bitcoin rarities market. The hunt for rare satoshis has grown from a niche hobby into a full-fledged industry.
But rare satoshis aren't just a collector's plaything. Behind them lies something far more significant: the first truly native asset market inside Bitcoin.
Think about it. Before Ordinals appeared, all Bitcoin transactions boiled down to transferring value from point A to point B. Buy bitcoin, sell bitcoin, pay for goods or services, send some to a friend. Bitcoin itself remained just a tool for something else.
Rare satoshis changed this dynamic. For the first time, a commodity emerged that exists only inside Bitcoin, trades only for bitcoin, and has no meaning outside the network. You can't withdraw an Uncommon Sat to a bank account. You can't touch it or put it in a safe. It exists exclusively as a record on the blockchain, and its value exists only in the eyes of those who understand that record.
This is the first commodity market where Bitcoin acts not as a medium of exchange for something external, but as a self-sufficient economic environment. The buyer pays bitcoins for special bitcoins. The seller receives bitcoins for special bitcoins. The entire economy loops within a single network, with no exit to the fiat world. To an outside observer, this might seem like nonsense, or at best, a childish game. But let's not forget: that's exactly how the world viewed Bitcoin itself for years.
And to understand why this market is viable, just look at who benefits from it. Bitcoin maximalists spent years criticizing altcoins for their DeFi and NFT ecosystems, calling it all a distraction from the true purpose. Now they have their own market where they can speculate and collect without touching any "shitcoins." Miners gained a new revenue stream: more transactions, higher fees, plus rare satoshis themselves as a block reward bonus.
Bitcoin used to be a savings account: put it away and forget. Now an entire infrastructure has grown around it: marketplaces, explorers, specialized wallets. New developers and new users have joined the ecosystem. The network has come alive. And Bitcoin itself gained what it was missing: the ability to evolve without betraying its core.
And here's what truly matters: this entire economy operates without intermediaries. Without experts. Without the need to trust anyone. The authenticity of a rare satoshi cannot be faked. Not difficult, not expensive, but simply impossible. Mathematically impossible.
In the world of physical coins, an expert can make a mistake. A certificate can be forged. Provenance can be fabricated. Even the best numismatists buy fakes and discover it years later. The entire industry rests on trust, and trust is a shaky foundation.
In the world of rare satoshis, there's no one to trust and no reason to. The ordinal number is calculated from the very structure of the blockchain. Anyone with a computer can independently verify: yes, this satoshi is the first in block 840,000. Yes, this block was mined after the halving. Code doesn't lie. Math doesn't make mistakes.
This guarantee opens new possibilities not just for collectors, but for artists too. A rare satoshi becomes not merely a vessel for art, but an integral part of it. An inscription on an Uncommon Sat from 2009 absorbs sixteen years of blockchain history. Art on a Pizza Sat inherits the legend of two pizzas. A piece on a Block 9 Sat carries the trace of Satoshi himself.
It's like the difference between a painting on an ordinary canvas and a painting on a fragment of the Berlin Wall. Technically, both are just a surface for paint. But the carrier's history adds a layer of meaning unavailable to any other canvas.
And here's another advantage of digital numismatics over classical. In the physical world, engraving on a rare coin destroys its value. In Bitcoin, it's the opposite: an inscription doesn't destroy, it adds. Creates a new layer of history on top of the existing one. The coin becomes a canvas without ceasing to be a coin.
For investors, a separate opportunity opens up here. In the chapter on trains, I compared Bitcoin to a growing metropolis: the center was built up long ago and costs millions, but on the outskirts there are still plots at affordable prices. Rare satoshis are those very outskirts. While most people only follow the price of a whole bitcoin, a small group of pioneers is staking out new territory.
No guarantees. Rare satoshis may forever remain a niche hobby. But crypto has shown this scenario time and again: a toy for geeks transforms into a billion-dollar industry. CryptoPunks were given away for free. The first bitcoins cost fractions of a cent. Those who saw the potential before others were rewarded for their foresight.
Rare satoshis bring us back to Bitcoin's origins. To an era when the network was an experiment run by a handful of enthusiasts. To times when 10,000 bitcoins could be traded for two pizzas. To the spirit of pioneers who believed in the idea while the rest of the world called them crazy.
The circle is complete. The Double Eagle is worth $18.9 million not because of the gold in it, but because of its history, rarity, and the human desire to own something unique. Rare satoshis work on the same principles, only without the physical shell. Imagine the Double Eagle transformed into a pure idea: a unique artifact that travels from collector to collector without intermediaries, without experts, without the need to trust anyone.
Perhaps in a hundred years, collectors will hunt for satoshis from the first blocks with the same fervor they chase ancient coins today. Or maybe this will all turn out to be a quirky episode in cryptocurrency history. But here's what's undeniable: for the first time, numismatics has become truly digital. Not digitized, not a virtual copy of the physical world, but a new form of collecting, possible only in the blockchain era.
This is perhaps the main lesson of rare satoshis. Bitcoin continues to surprise. Sixteen years after launch, it still reveals possibilities hidden there from the very first day. Who knows what other treasures await discoverers in this old blockchain.
1 The 1933 Double Eagle sold for $18.9 million at Sotheby's auction in June 2021, making it the most expensive coin ever sold. Wikipedia: Double Eagle
2 Heritage Auctions reported $1.76 billion in total sales for 2023, marking their most successful year. Heritage Auctions Press Release
3 Ordinal Theory Handbook, the foundational document describing ordinal theory and sat rarity system. docs.ordinals.com
4 ViaBTC auctioned the fourth Epic Sat from block 840,000 for 33.3 BTC in April 2024. Bitcoin Magazine, April 25, 2024
5 ZK Shark, creator of OMB, documents the project's history and rare sats hunting. ZK Shark's Substack
6 Ordinal Maxi Biz (OMB) became the first Bitcoin Ordinals collection featured at Christie's auction in April 2024. Christie's: Ordinal Maxi Biz
7 Commoners: the first 10K collection inscribed entirely on Uncommon Sats. Official website