update: Additional blockchain analysis indicates This purchase was the result of a commercial “satellite hunting operation.” programmatically Buy and withdraw Bitcoin from Binance. The article has been amended accordingly.
One of only four rare “Epic Sats” as defined by the Ordinals protocol has been discovered and recovered from Bitcoin and cryptocurrency exchange Binance today.
These special Satoshis do not exist natively on Bitcoin, but can be identified by accompanying software, and are thought to be some of the rarest and most important in Bitcoin history. Bitcoin has a hard limit of 2.1 quintillion satoshis, or 21 million BTC, but the protocol does not track them separately.
This ordering is only identified in the Ordinals protocol, a top-level meta-protocol built on top of Bitcoin.
Breaking news: the first Satoshi #bitcoinThe second halving block was discovered by a Binance user.
$10 transaction worth $33 $BTC. Jackpot 🙌 pic.twitter.com/rLE16ogNsc
— Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) May 2, 2024
The term “Epic Sat” refers to the first satoshi of Bitcoin’s halving, which occurs approximately every four years. recently, First Epic Sat from 2024 Half of it sold for more than $2 million at auction, sparking intrigue surrounding these rare units.
In this case, a Binance user withdrew a transaction involving Epic Sat from the 420,000th Bitcoin block in 2016. Binance was unable to identify and hold his UTXOs, including his valuable SATOSHI, and there may have been a multi-million dollar oversight.
Initially thought to be a single Exchange user, analysis revealed by Mononaut on X The acquirer revealed that it was likely a sophisticated operation to probe Binance’s inventory of UTXOs that may be related to Ordinal’s rare SAT.
Blockchain analysis shows that this UTXO is classified by Ordinals as containing a Sat number.1575000000000000” moved to the user’s wallet after purchasing and transferring Bitcoin.
Only four such “epicsats” exist to date, making their rarity comparable to winning the lottery. (A total of 34 will be released in subsequent half-lives).
The address of the wallet that currently contains the UTXO pointing to the coveted SATOSHI is bc1ptjcsnnycr52ccwg4mvvsczkwzvc0qydlxw6q7pcelxkx8equk3asduuz86.
Market players will no doubt wait to see whether the owners will keep EpicSat for themselves or sell it for millions of dollars.
Sleuths can validate transactions by referencing Ordinals indexing tools such as: Ord.io and Ordinals.com. These identify Satoshi’s number and location in the chain, allowing his location to be tracked through the Explorer-like Mempool.space.
Although debatable, these epicsats create serious digital scarcity, akin to rare collectibles. The Binance user’s good fortune may spark further interest and intensify his exploration of his two Epic Sats in 2012 and the rest of 2020.
