# Great Upheaval In Palindrome Rarity
For Palindrome lovers, September 22, 2012 was a tragic day in Bitcoin history. On this day the number of palindromes being added to the Bitcoin blockchain was drastically cut by over 90%. What happened and what does it mean for the value of palindromes going forward?
Sats are the individual pieces of each bitcoin. Every time a new bitcoin is added there are 100,000,000 more sats for hunters to search through looking for valuable uncommons, vintage sats and palindromes. Sats are numbered sequentially starting at 0 on January 3rd, 2009. Occasionally a sat number can be read the same forwards and backwards, such as **1234321**. These are called palindromes.
At around 10:26 UTC on September 22, 2012 the sat number reached 999999999999999, which was the last 15 digit sat number. For about three years sat numbers had been 15 digits long and during those years there were approximately 10 new palindromes for each bitcoin. This is easy to calculate. Let's look at two random consecutive palindromes from February 7, 2010.
1945498**5**8945491 \
1945498**6**8945491
Notice just the single middle number changed from 5 to 6, and by simply subtracting the two numbers you can deduce there are 10,000,000 sats between them. Every 15 digit palindrome was the same with the middle number being the key every 10 million sats. Knowing there are 100 million sats in a bitcoin, we can calculate there were 10 palindromes (100,000,000 / 10,000,000) for each new bitcoin when there were 15 digits.
This change to 16 digits happened at Block 200,000 and there were 50 BTC in each block, which shows there were 100 Million Palindromes in existence on that day.\
\
200,000 Blocks \* 50 BTC \* 10 Palindromes/BTC = **100,000,000 Palindromes Created**
That number is not exact but it is close enough for this basic illustration. The reason it is wrong is because there were 14 character sats prior to 07.22.2009, and 13 characters prior to 14, etc, etc... but for over three years it was 15 characters and the vast majority of early Palindromes were created in these years. If you know the exact number of Palindromes on September 22, 2012 let me know and I will update this.
## Then Something Big Happened
The sat number changed to 16 digits with number 1000000000000000. Let's take a look at two consecutive 16 digit palindromes created after this happened.
1945498**55**8945491 \
1945498**66**8945491
Now there were two numbers in the middle of the palindrome, and both had to be the same. If either was different it would not read the same both ways. When we subtract the two numbers to see how many sats are between them we get 110,000,000 (less than 1 per Bitcoin). That's eleven times as many sats between each palindrome... or, to look at it another way, there were only 9% as many palindromes being created after September 22, 2012.
This in itself would be tragic for crypto palindrome fans everywhere, but there was another terrible development for the palindrome kingdom just two months and 10,000 Blocks later on November 28, 2012. The first bitcoin halving.
For these two-ish months Bitcoin was still being created at the same rate (50 per/block), but as I showed above there was only one Palindrome created every 110,000,000 sats. For historic data purposes we can calculate the exact number of Palindromes created during this time.
10,000 Blocks \* 50 BTC \* 100,000,000 Sats = 50,000,000,000,000 Sats during this time\
50,000,000,000 Sats / 110,000,000 Sats/Palindrome = **454,545 Palindromes Created**
Prior to November 28, 2012 there were approximately 7200 BTC created per day. After the bitcoin halving these numbers dropped in half to 3600 per day, which also cut the number in palindromes in half.
Let's see where that leaves the poor palindrome population (these numbers are approximate).
* Prior to September 22, 2012 - 72,000 palindromes per day
* September 22, until November 28, 2012 - 6,500 per day
* After November 28, 2012 halving - 3,250 per day
That's about a 95% drop in the number of palindromes created per day in just over 2 months. We can extend the drop over a year and say there were over 26 million palindromes created in 2011, but only around 1.2 Million in 2013.
We can do the match for the next 210,000 blocks, which was the time before the next halving.
210,000 Blocks \* 25 BTC \* 100,000,000 Sats = 525,000,000,000,000 Sats during this time\
525,000,000,000,000 Sats / 110,000,000 Sats/Palindrome = **4,772,727 Palindromes Created**
We've done a lot of math up until now, but we have everything we need based on the numbers above to get a good idea of just how many fewer palindromes we see today.
We are due for another halving in early 2024 which will drop the number of Palindromes to less than 3 per block. Put another way, there will be less than 600,000 palindromes in the next 210,000 blocks after this halving.
### Why Do We Care?
As a Sat Hunter, discovering this information changed how I hunt and what I look for. I have been under the impression the earlier the sat the more valuable it is. This assumption is a solid one for Block 9 and Vintage sats, but when it comes to palindromes I doubt this will be true in the long run.
The news get worse for the next generations of palindromes with bitcoin continuing to halve every four years or so, again cutting the number 50%. There were more palindromes created before the first halving than will be created in the 50 years following.
It is going to take a while for us to discover the value impact of this phenomena. It is so drastic it almost calls for two separate categories such as...
* Pre-halving Palindromes
* Post-halving Palindromes
### What About Alpha/Name Palindromes?
Each sat has a name also which has always been 11 characters since Block 0, but on November 05, 2023 aaaaaaaaaaa (11 a's) will suddenly become zzzzzzzzzz (10 z's). What will this do to the number of Alpha Palindromes? It turns out not much. The number will drop around 3.8% from one approximately every 11,880,000 to one every 12,338,000.
### What Are Your Thoughts?
For the foreseeable future there will be a new Palindrome every 110,000,000 sats. Even though I just did the math, I can't get over the fact that there is less than one palindrome in each Bitcoin and as Bitcoin halves, the number of Palindromes will continue to halve as well. So will older palindromes prior to 2012 with 15 digits be worth more, or will harder to find palindromes with 16 digits be more valuable? Let us know what you think and if this impacts the way you search.
Article written 08.21.2023 by [Spaid](https://twitter.com/Spaid71454064).
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