# What is a rare sat?

Ordinal theory numbers every satoshi; some of those numbers land on something. Every kind Mantel recognises, with its supply, and how to check a wallet.

Published 2026-08-30, updated 2026-08-30. https://mantel.gallery/guides/what-is-a-rare-sat

> A rare sat is a single satoshi whose place in Bitcoin's history makes it collectible: the first sat of a block, a sat mined in Satoshi Nakamoto's own blocks, a sat that paid for the first pizza, a sat whose number reads the same backwards. Ordinal theory assigns every one of the 2.1 quadrillion sats a number in the order it was mined, so these properties are facts about the chain rather than opinions of a marketplace. Mantel checks every output of a Bitcoin address against all of them, including 411,772 traced ranges for pizza, hitman, JPEG and Silk Road sats.

Every bitcoin is 100,000,000 satoshis. Ordinal theory, written by Casey Rodarmor in 2023, numbers each of them in the order it was mined, sat 0 in the genesis block and sat 2,099,999,997,689,999 the last that will ever exist. The numbering follows a simple rule: the sats in a transaction's inputs flow into its outputs in order, first in first out, and whatever is left over goes to the miner as the fee. That rule is what lets a sat be tracked from the block it was born in to the wallet holding it today, and it is what makes a rare sat a fact rather than a label.

## The six grades

Rodarmor's own scheme names six grades by where a sat falls in the mining schedule:

| Grade | What it is | Supply |
| --- | --- | --- |
| common | any sat that is not the first of its block | almost all of them |
| uncommon | the first sat of each block | about 910,000 so far, 144 a day |
| rare | the first sat of each difficulty adjustment (every 2,016 blocks) | 3,437 so far |
| epic | the first sat of each halving (every 210,000 blocks) | 4 so far |
| legendary | the first sat of each cycle, where a halving and an adjustment coincide (every six halvings) | none until 2032 |
| mythic | sat 0, in the genesis block | one, and it cannot move |

The first sat of the genesis block is mythic and is stuck there forever, since the genesis coinbase is unspendable.

## Black sats

The same six grades, from the other end: the last sat of a block, of an adjustment period, of a halving, of a cycle. Black uncommon, black rare, black epic, black legendary. Same supplies as their bright twins, and the same difficulty to find, because every output has to be traced to know which sat it ends on.

## The early blocks

Some sats are rare because of when they were mined rather than where in a block they sit:

- **Vintage**: any sat from the first 1,000 blocks. 50,000 BTC of them, most never moved.
- **Nakamoto**: sats mined in the blocks attributed to Satoshi by the Patoshi pattern, Sergio Demian Lerner's analysis of the extra-nonce behaviour of the earliest miner. 21,953 blocks. Almost none have ever moved.
- **Block 9**: the first block whose coins were spent, in the transaction to Hal Finney in January 2009. The sats from that block are the oldest ones that have ever changed hands. Sub-categories name the ones from the 450 and 450x ranges hunters trade.
- **Block 78**: the first block mined by someone other than Satoshi, by Hal Finney.
- **Block 286**: the first block known to have been mined by a named miner using the original client on a different machine, and a favourite of hunters for that reason.

## The traced lists

Some sats are rare because of a transaction they were in. These cannot be computed from the block height; the transaction's inputs have to be traced. Mantel holds the full traced ranges for all four and checks every output against them:

- **Pizza**: the 10,000 BTC that bought two pizzas on 22 May 2010. 828 ranges.
- **Hitman**: the 1,670 BTC paid on Silk Road in 2013 in what was alleged to be a murder-for-hire. 6,200 ranges.
- **JPEG**: the 500 BTC paid for the first known purchase of an image with bitcoin, in 2010. Ten ranges.
- **Silk Road**: the coins from the first US Marshals auction of Silk Road bitcoin in 2014, 405,534 ranges covering 29,656 BTC.

## The number itself

The rest are properties of the sat's decimal number, and any sat can be checked by arithmetic alone:

- **Palindrome**: reads the same backwards, like 1,004,004,001. **Palinception**: a palindrome whose halves are themselves palindromes; **uniform palinception** and **perfect palinception** tighten the rule further.
- **Alpha** and **omega**: the first sat of a whole bitcoin (ends in eight zeros) and the last (ends in eight nines).
- **Name palindrome**: every sat has a name, base 26 of its distance from the last sat ever, so sat 0 is `nvtdijuwxlp` and the last sat is `a`; a name that reads the same backwards is its own category.
- **Fibonacci**: the sat number is a Fibonacci number. Seventy-four fit under the last sat.
- **1, 2 or 3 digits**: the number uses only one, two or three distinct digits, over at least five places. One digit is rarest: 11111, 222222, and so on.
- **Binary**: only zeros and ones. **Sequential**: the digits step up or down by one all the way, like 456789 or 987654321.

## What Mantel does not name

The second and third hitman payments, because no clean public trace exists; and anything defined by a marketplace rather than the chain. When Magic Eden closed its Bitcoin marketplace in March 2026 its community guide to rare sats went with it. Everything above is computed from the chain and the traced ranges, so it does not depend on any marketplace staying open.

## How the check works

Paste a Bitcoin address into the search on the homepage. The address's outputs are read from ordinals.com, which reports the sat ranges each output holds. Which block a sat was mined in follows from the subsidy schedule, so no index is needed for the six grades, the black variants or the early blocks; the traced lists are looked up in Mantel's own database; the number properties are arithmetic. Up to three hundred outputs are checked per address and the Rare sats row says how many it looked at. Open any inscription and its own sat is named the same way.

## Questions

**How rare is an uncommon sat?**

One per block. An uncommon sat is the first sat mined in each block, so there are about as many as there are blocks, roughly 910,000 as of August 2026, and about 144 new ones a day. Rare (first of a difficulty period) has 3,437 so far; epic (first of a halving) has four; legendary (first of a cycle) has none yet.

**Do rare sats need to be inscribed?**

No. A rare sat is a sat, with or without an inscription on it. Sat hunters move them into their own outputs so they can be sent and sold; an inscription on a rare sat is a separate thing that happens to ride the same sat.

**How do I check if my wallet has rare sats?**

Paste a Bitcoin address into the search on mantel.gallery. The wallet's outputs are read from ordinals.com and every sat range is checked against the full list; the Rare sats row says what it found and how many outputs it looked at, up to three hundred.

**Is a black sat rarer than an uncommon one?**

Same supply, different edge. Uncommon is the first sat of a block; black uncommon is the last. Black variants exist for uncommon, rare, epic and legendary, and hunters price them close to their bright twins.

Data on this page: ordinals.com sat ranges per output; block heights from the subsidy schedule; the Patoshi block list (21,953 blocks) and 411,772 traced ranges held in Mantel's database. Refreshed 30 August 2026.