10,000 cents on 10,000 sats

After more than a century in circulation, the penny has become both a worthless relic of inflation and a prized collector's item. A unit of currency, a piece of metal, a ghost of value. 

The last copper pennies were minted in 1982, after which they have been struck in zinc. A penny from any given year will always be worth exactly 1¢, according to the US Treasury, but the copper in pre-1982 pennies now has a metal value of approximately 2.5¢. 

Sparked by this discrepancy in value, Rutherford Chang began by sorting through hundreds of thousands of pennies before taking 10,000 copper coins out of circulation and archivally documenting them. The final state of these 10,000 copper cents are inscribed on 10,000 satoshis, and the physical coins are smelted into a solid copper cube.  

As the traditional penny fades into irrelevance and its production is ultimately terminated, this digitally scarce set of 10,000 will remain etched on the Bitcoin blockchain in perpetuity.

If it's your first time collecting ordinals, find introductory info here

We are proud to be collaborating with Inscribing Atlantis and Gamma for the release of CENTS.