6 ms·

I like that the post mentions she's mined 200,000 Satoshis. Is this some kind of Bitcoin Shibboleth? I had to google it. It's about $8.

zaptheimpaler 9y ago
1 Satoshi = 0.00000001 BTC (10^-8 BTC) It represents the smallest fraction of 1 bitcoin you can use as an amount in a transaction, so they are the smallest (indivisible) units.
- zghst 9y ago
  Very interesting name for a decimal. What an intricate community
  - ufo 9y ago
    (Satoshi is the inventor of bitcoin, in case you don't know)
    - sillysaurus3 9y ago
      Not quite. The central ideas underpinning bitcoin are very old, tracing back to hashcash and bitgold. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Hashcash#History https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Hashcash#History It's not really an important distinction, but maybe someone will find the history interesting.
      - proofofstake 9y ago
        See also this 1996 NSA paper "How to Make a Mint: The Cryptography of Anonymous Electronic Cash", predating both Hashcash and Bit gold. http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/money/nsamint/nsamint.htm http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/money... (and OP seems factually correct: Satoshi was the inventor of Bitcoin).
        andrewla 9y ago
        The idea of electronic money is old. What this describes is a Chaum blind-signature style centrally-cleared coin, which dates back to his 1983 paper. There is no protection against double-spends in this scheme (without the clearing agency taking an active role), and no protection against the central agency creating unlimited amounts of coin. Proof-of-work schemes like hashcash and bitgold are much closer to hitting on the central ideas that led to Bitcoin. It's like crediting Democritus with atomic theory -- yes, he's talking about the same thing, but in such a way that the final realization is so different as to be unrecognizable.
      - toomim 9y ago
        Lots of people try to take credit for the ideas in Bitcoin (especially Adam Back, who you linked to), but Satoshi was its clear inventor.
        oska 9y ago
        Satoshi Nakamoto referenced Adam Back in his Bitcoin white paper. I don't see that as Adam Back ‘trying to take credit’, rather the reverse.
      - tylersmith 9y ago
        HashCash's contributions were fairly small. PoW was already invented and RPoW quickly improved upon it. I have no idea why Satoshi even referenced it.
      - rmrfrmrf 9y ago
        In that case, Ben Franklin is the inventor of the internet.
  - derefr 9y ago
    It's the name of the creator of Bitcoin, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto. You can imagine them as little pennies with Satoshi's head imprinted on them, if you like. And it's not really a decimal; it's more properly "1 bitcoin" in the technical sense. 1BTC was later defined to be equal to 10^8 Satoshis because that seemed like a useful amount of money to track exchange rates for (though now it's about 10^4 too high.)
    - lstyls 9y ago
      "Name" is maybe not quite right, "Satoshi Nakomoto" is the creator's pseudonym. The actual author of the bitcoin whitepaper is unknown and the subject of much speculation. I'm sure OP knows this, I'm just being pedantic.
      - knocte 9y ago
        Strictly speaking, it's not known if the name is a pseudonym either. There are people in the world that have that name and they haven't denied being the creator.
        lstyls 9y ago
        If it is said author's name, why have they not publicly claimed to be this Satoshi? Name one such individual who has credibly been considered to have invented bitcoin.
        phaemon 9y ago
        You want the name of the Satoshi Nakomoto who is most likely to be the Satoshi Nakomoto? The name? That's what you want? Are you sure you've thought this through?
      - dragonwriter 9y ago
        A pseudonym is a kind of name, so “name” is entirely correct, if not entirely complete (though, AFAIK, it is as complete as is known to be correct, since it is only widely presumed, rather than known, that the name is a pseudonym.)
  - mrb 9y ago
    Wait until you see the nomenclature used for Ethereum units: Wei, Kwei, Szabo, etc https://etherconverter.online https://etherconverter.online Buterin couldn't possibly have made it more complicated.
    - eberkund 9y ago
      It looks like standard SI prefixes to me, what's so complicated about that?
      - mrb 9y ago
        They don't use SI prefixes. They use wei, ada, babbage, shannon, szabo, finney, ether, and einstein. facepalm
  - Ajedi32 9y ago
    The US Dollar has the penny, nickle, dime, and quarter, and Bitcoin has the satoshi. It's not really that hard to understand.
- pycal 9y ago
  One of the things I found surprising and curious about bitcoin is that the minimum viable amount is actually the transaction fee, which is maybe around 27,000 satoshis (median tx size x 120 satoshis/byte). The surprising part for me was that, as a corollary to that, wallets with less than that amount have bitcoin in them which is potentially permanently removed from the total supply of BTC.
  - biggerfisch 9y ago
    Well, you can send zero fee transactions, they'll just take a while to get through, depending on the current size of the mempool. And you can also always send transactions from multiple addresses, meaning you can add up these small amounts to something more meaningful
    - rtkwe 9y ago
      Will zero fee transactions ever get confirmations? They'll be the absolute last thing any miner includes so unless there's nothing else I wouldn't expect them to get any confirmations.
ringaroundthetx 9y ago
the base unit a lot of trading is quoted in satoshis instead of "x thousandth fractions of a bitcoin"
- Slartie 9y ago
  Ehm...where is this the case? Pretty much all exchanges that I actively monitor all list their order books, trade history etc. in bitcoin, with a varying number of decimals, and they also accept orders in bitcoin denomination as well. Sometimes they offer a switch in their own trading UI to use mBTC (milli-bitcoin, a thousanth of a bitcoin) as the unit, but that is always optional and I know nobody who uses it. That being said, I also had a great laugh reading the article when it came to "200,000 satoshis". Although I totally believe her - it's hard to earn significant amounts of BTC via mining today without investing huge amounts of money and dealing with constricted ASIC supplies, so you need to have time and cash to blow at it. But she shouldn't have mentioned that number in the context of "yeah, our mining ops suddenly started to generate huge returns".
  - ringaroundthetx 9y ago
    > Ehm...where is this the case? Most of the exchanges shut down their chat rooms but thats where it is mostly said, and other real time trading arenas where people talk. People say 200k/sat while reading .000200000 btc but a satoshi also works in other quotes where other cryptocurrencies are the base unit as well. In an XMR/ETH market, the XMR would be quoted in X eth-sat or ethereum satoshis. The GUIs use a variety of different metric base units and there is no agreement on the GUIs, that has nothing to do with the terms people use in speech, as they don't say "x thousandth of a bitcoin"
dogruck 9y ago
Yes I laughed reading that part because it followed her saying they made a lot of money. How embarrassing.

zaptheimpaler 9y ago

1 Satoshi = 0.00000001 BTC (10^-8 BTC) It represents the smallest fraction of 1 bitcoin you can use as an amount in a transaction, so they are the smallest (indivisible) units.

zghst 9y ago
Very interesting name for a decimal. What an intricate community
- ufo 9y ago
  (Satoshi is the inventor of bitcoin, in case you don't know)
  - sillysaurus3 9y ago
    Not quite. The central ideas underpinning bitcoin are very old, tracing back to hashcash and bitgold. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Hashcash#History https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Hashcash#History It's not really an important distinction, but maybe someone will find the history interesting.
    - proofofstake 9y ago
      See also this 1996 NSA paper "How to Make a Mint: The Cryptography of Anonymous Electronic Cash", predating both Hashcash and Bit gold. http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/money/nsamint/nsamint.htm http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/money... (and OP seems factually correct: Satoshi was the inventor of Bitcoin).
      - andrewla 9y ago
        The idea of electronic money is old. What this describes is a Chaum blind-signature style centrally-cleared coin, which dates back to his 1983 paper. There is no protection against double-spends in this scheme (without the clearing agency taking an active role), and no protection against the central agency creating unlimited amounts of coin. Proof-of-work schemes like hashcash and bitgold are much closer to hitting on the central ideas that led to Bitcoin. It's like crediting Democritus with atomic theory -- yes, he's talking about the same thing, but in such a way that the final realization is so different as to be unrecognizable.
    - toomim 9y ago
      Lots of people try to take credit for the ideas in Bitcoin (especially Adam Back, who you linked to), but Satoshi was its clear inventor.
      - oska 9y ago
        Satoshi Nakamoto referenced Adam Back in his Bitcoin white paper. I don't see that as Adam Back ‘trying to take credit’, rather the reverse.
    - tylersmith 9y ago
      HashCash's contributions were fairly small. PoW was already invented and RPoW quickly improved upon it. I have no idea why Satoshi even referenced it.
    - rmrfrmrf 9y ago
      In that case, Ben Franklin is the inventor of the internet.
- derefr 9y ago
  It's the name of the creator of Bitcoin, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto. You can imagine them as little pennies with Satoshi's head imprinted on them, if you like. And it's not really a decimal; it's more properly "1 bitcoin" in the technical sense. 1BTC was later defined to be equal to 10^8 Satoshis because that seemed like a useful amount of money to track exchange rates for (though now it's about 10^4 too high.)
  - lstyls 9y ago
    "Name" is maybe not quite right, "Satoshi Nakomoto" is the creator's pseudonym. The actual author of the bitcoin whitepaper is unknown and the subject of much speculation. I'm sure OP knows this, I'm just being pedantic.
    - knocte 9y ago
      Strictly speaking, it's not known if the name is a pseudonym either. There are people in the world that have that name and they haven't denied being the creator.
      - lstyls 9y ago
        If it is said author's name, why have they not publicly claimed to be this Satoshi? Name one such individual who has credibly been considered to have invented bitcoin.
        phaemon 9y ago
        You want the name of the Satoshi Nakomoto who is most likely to be the Satoshi Nakomoto? The name? That's what you want? Are you sure you've thought this through?
    - dragonwriter 9y ago
      A pseudonym is a kind of name, so “name” is entirely correct, if not entirely complete (though, AFAIK, it is as complete as is known to be correct, since it is only widely presumed, rather than known, that the name is a pseudonym.)
- mrb 9y ago
  Wait until you see the nomenclature used for Ethereum units: Wei, Kwei, Szabo, etc https://etherconverter.online https://etherconverter.online Buterin couldn't possibly have made it more complicated.
  - eberkund 9y ago
    It looks like standard SI prefixes to me, what's so complicated about that?
    - mrb 9y ago
      They don't use SI prefixes. They use wei, ada, babbage, shannon, szabo, finney, ether, and einstein. facepalm
- Ajedi32 9y ago
  The US Dollar has the penny, nickle, dime, and quarter, and Bitcoin has the satoshi. It's not really that hard to understand.
pycal 9y ago
One of the things I found surprising and curious about bitcoin is that the minimum viable amount is actually the transaction fee, which is maybe around 27,000 satoshis (median tx size x 120 satoshis/byte). The surprising part for me was that, as a corollary to that, wallets with less than that amount have bitcoin in them which is potentially permanently removed from the total supply of BTC.
- biggerfisch 9y ago
  Well, you can send zero fee transactions, they'll just take a while to get through, depending on the current size of the mempool. And you can also always send transactions from multiple addresses, meaning you can add up these small amounts to something more meaningful
  - rtkwe 9y ago
    Will zero fee transactions ever get confirmations? They'll be the absolute last thing any miner includes so unless there's nothing else I wouldn't expect them to get any confirmations.

ringaroundthetx 9y ago

the base unit a lot of trading is quoted in satoshis instead of "x thousandth fractions of a bitcoin"

Slartie 9y ago
Ehm...where is this the case? Pretty much all exchanges that I actively monitor all list their order books, trade history etc. in bitcoin, with a varying number of decimals, and they also accept orders in bitcoin denomination as well. Sometimes they offer a switch in their own trading UI to use mBTC (milli-bitcoin, a thousanth of a bitcoin) as the unit, but that is always optional and I know nobody who uses it. That being said, I also had a great laugh reading the article when it came to "200,000 satoshis". Although I totally believe her - it's hard to earn significant amounts of BTC via mining today without investing huge amounts of money and dealing with constricted ASIC supplies, so you need to have time and cash to blow at it. But she shouldn't have mentioned that number in the context of "yeah, our mining ops suddenly started to generate huge returns".
- ringaroundthetx 9y ago
  > Ehm...where is this the case? Most of the exchanges shut down their chat rooms but thats where it is mostly said, and other real time trading arenas where people talk. People say 200k/sat while reading .000200000 btc but a satoshi also works in other quotes where other cryptocurrencies are the base unit as well. In an XMR/ETH market, the XMR would be quoted in X eth-sat or ethereum satoshis. The GUIs use a variety of different metric base units and there is no agreement on the GUIs, that has nothing to do with the terms people use in speech, as they don't say "x thousandth of a bitcoin"

dogruck 9y ago

Yes I laughed reading that part because it followed her saying they made a lot of money. How embarrassing.