The moment people heard about bitcoin, interest started taking over their body. Immediately, they sought to find out how to get themselves some of these popular coins, but as soon as they saw the price, they changed their mind.
They thought that they had to buy 1 coin in order to get started, but as a matter of fact, they do not. To make sense of this, it is important to go back to the concept of divisibility.
You have probably grown tired of this concept from preschool up to high school, but in order to understand the concept of bitcoin, it is necessary to go back to it once more.
You are not required to send a whole bitcoin if you want to sell or trade online. You only need fractions of bitcoin. It’s quite the same with fiat currencies. With them, it is not necessary for you to use one whole dollar to make a purchase, depending on the price of the product you want to purchase, of course.
Every dollar is composed of a penny or nickel. That is also how it is with bitcoin, but instead of pennies and nickels, bitcoins are composed of Satoshis.
So, What Is a Satoshi?
Just like an atom, satoshi is the smallest unit of bitcoin. This said, you can just imagine that bitcoin is composed of thousands of these critters.
You can expect about 100,000,000 satoshis in one bitcoin. In other words, bitcoin is not just one bitcoin. It is the end product of millions of satoshis that compiled together.
This said, you do not really have to purchase one coin if you want to make a transaction. You can just purchase fractions of these bitcoins, and then you are good to go.
But if that is how things are, then how can one measure bitcoin?
Unit | Value (BTC) |
BTC (or Bitcoin) | 1 |
cBTC or bitcent | 0.01 |
mBTC or millibit | 0.001 |
μBTC or bit | 0.000001 |
finney | 0.0000001 |
satoshi | 0.00000001 |
The table above should give you a good idea about how bitcoin is calculated. Getting into the world of bitcoin is quite exciting, but before you dive into this new reality, you have to give yourself time to be aware of the nuts and bolts of bitcoin.