Time Is Running Out in the Hunt for Rare Bitcoin
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 Pokémon 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 comprised 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.
Restey is part of a small, tight-knit band of hunters trying to root out these rare sats, which are scattered across the bitcoin network. They do this by depositing batches of bitcoin with a crypto exchange, then withdrawing the same amount—a little like depositing cash with a bank teller and immediately taking it out again from the ATM outside. The coins they receive in return are not the same they deposited, giving them a fresh stash through which to sift. They rinse and repeat.
