The hunt for rare bitcoin is nearing an end
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Billy Restey is a digital artist who runs a studio in Seattle. But after hours, he hunts for rare chunks of bitcoin. He does it for the thrill. It's like collecting Magic: The Gathering or Pokemon cards," says Restey. It's that excitement of, like, what if I catch something rare?"
In the same way a dollar is made up of 100 cents, one bitcoin is composed of 100 million satoshis-or sats, for short. But not all sats are made equal. Those produced in the year bitcoin was created are considered vintage, like a fine wine. Other coveted sats were part of transactions made by bitcoin's inventor. Some correspond with a particular transaction milestone. These and various other properties make some sats more scarce than others-and therefore more valuable. The very rarest can sell for tens of millions of times their face value; in April, a single sat, normally worth $0.0006, sold for $2.1 million.