How many satoshis are there in Bitcoin?
What is Satoshi? See how these smaller units make Bitcoin more useful in the real world.
Bitcoin (BTC 0.23%) Prices are rising these days. The current price of the oldest cryptocurrency is $67,400 per digital coin. It’s not a hasty change, and the high price could prevent many potential Bitcoin buyers from taking the plunge.
Fortunately, you don’t have to purchase all of Bitcoin.
The currency is divided into 100 million satoshis. Satoshi, named after Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious founder of the Bitcoin project, is worth $0.00067 at current prices.
It’s like dollars and cents, except that units like cents in Bitcoin are much smaller fractions than 1/100th.
If you plan to use your cryptocurrency in real-world transactions, these units will be more useful than the clumsy Bitcoin coin. A cheap burger costs $6.74, or 10,000 satoshi. With 100,000 satoshi, you can buy two pizzas for your family or concert tickets. Nice and easy.
These nice, round numbers are easier to manipulate than Bitcoin. The price of that burger is 0.0001 Bitcoin. It can be easily confused with 0.00001 Bitcoin, which only gets you bubble gum. Using Satoshi instead of Bitcoin will lead to fewer arguments over decimal places at cryptocurrency-friendly burger stands.
Bitcoin’s supply line is measured in Satoshis.
Satoshi units also limit the extent to which Bitcoin’s halving rewards can be used. Bitcoin miners currently receive 3.125 new bitcoins for verifying data blocks, down from 6.5 coins earlier this year. Approximately 500 new coins are minted every day, a number that has been halved since the Bitcoin halving in April 2024.
Halving occurs every 210,000 blocks of verified data, approximately every four years. Around 2136, the 31st halving will give Bitcoin miners one satoshi per data block. Four years later, at the 32nd and final halving, the reward will fall below 1 satoshi, which will halt the halving process and Bitcoin inflation.
Therefore, the final Satoshi will be issued around 2140, completing a limited set of 21 million Bitcoins. There are already 19.7 million coins in circulation, equivalent to 93.8% of the lifetime supply. This scarcity is a large part of Bitcoin’s appeal and protects its value over the long term.
