The First Legendary Sat is approaching
Bitcoin works like a clock. Its mechanics create recurring periodic events, and each of these events marks the birth of a particular satoshi. These are known as rare sats, and their nomenclature was defined by Ordinal Theory. This classification is based on Bitcoin’s major recurring events:
- Uncommon: the first satoshi of a block, roughly every 10 minutes;
- Rare: the first satoshi of a difficulty adjustment period, every 2,016 blocks, or roughly every 14 days;
- Epic: the first satoshi of a halving, every 210,000 blocks, or roughly every four years;
- Legendary: the first satoshi of a new Bitcoin cycle.
A cycle begins when a halving and a difficulty adjustment coincide. This only happens every six halvings, or every 1,260,000 blocks, roughly every 24 years. The first such conjunction is expected in 2032 and will produce satoshi 2,067,187,500,000,000.
Only Five Legendary Sats
Over Bitcoin’s entire history, only five Legendary Sats will ever exist. Five out of the roughly 2.1 quadrillion satoshis that make up the 21 million bitcoins that will ever be created.
More than 20 million bitcoins have already been mined, yet no Legendary Sat has been mined so far. The first satoshi in this category will mark the beginning of Bitcoin’s next cycle. It is expected in 2032.
You may have noticed that the back of every Proof of Sats card shows the cycle to which its satoshi belongs, along with its difficulty adjustment period and halving epoch. Every satoshi mined so far belongs to cycle 0.
The birth of the first Legendary Sat in 2032 will mark the beginning of cycle 1.
This type of rarity is different from that of exotic sats, whose appeal may come from historical provenance, a particular date, or a numerical property. We explain this distinction in our article about Rare Sats and Exotic Sats.
Follow Its Arrival with the Rare Sats Clock
What makes this Legendary Sat especially fascinating is that we already know its block, its number, and therefore even the Proof of Sats visual that can be generated from that number.
The Rare Sats Clock lets you follow the approach of upcoming Uncommon, Rare, Epic, and Legendary sats in real time. Connected directly to our Bitcoin Core node, it calculates when they will appear without using an Ordinals indexer.