Here’s the neat part, you don’t...
...or rather, you can’t find rare satoshis. Rare satoshis don’t exist because individual satoshis don’t actually exist within the bitcoin network, only UTXOs.
But my wallet says I have satoshis.
And the container of your food says it has calories. The bathroom scale says your body has lbs/kg. The tape measure says your floors have inches/cm. These are units of measure of a property of something, but they are not distinct individual units of the thing being measured. Calories measure energy. Scales measure mass. Rulers measure distance. These are properties of a thing, but not the thing itself.
Likewise, satoshis (aka, sats) are a unit of measure for bitcoin UTXOs, which are the "things" that actually exist within the bitcoin network. A UTXO, or "unspent transaction output," can be very small, only a few hundred sats, or it can be very large, hundreds of millions or even billions of sats, but there are only UTXOs measured in sats and spendable by their corresponding private keys. There are no satoshis sitting in storage in bitcoin wallets and nodes.
If that's true, then why is Bitcoin Magazine selling "rare satoshis"?
They are salesmen in search of profit, and not all salesmen are honest. The product they are selling misrepresents the truth. Put simply, Bitcoin Magazine is lying about what they are selling.
What they are actually selling is a UTXO measured in some amount of sats that can be cryptographically linked to another UTXO from the past that no longer exists. Why doesn't it exist? Because a UTXO is, by definition, "unspent." Once you spend one UTXO, new UTXOs are created and mined into a new block.
So I can't buy one of Hal Finney's satoshis?
Unfortunately, no, you cannot. At best you could pay someone like Bitcoin Magazine to spend one of their UTXOs to a new UTXO at an address you control. It is up to you to decide if the cryptographic link to previous entries in the ledger has any added value or meaning beyond the sats-denominated value of the UTXO.
It would be a little bit like if I had a dollar bill, and I went to the bank and deposited it into your account, and then the bank destroyed that physical bill and replaced it with a new one when you came in to withdraw it. While you would now possess access to the $1 of value, you would not have the dollar bill that I deposited. In fact, it no longer exists, even though there is proof on the bank's ledger of the transfer of value from me to you.
Ok, so what? I can do what i want with my money.
Yes, you can. That is the freedom afforded to you by bitcoin. You are free to trade your sats for a lesser amount of sats. It's just my opinion that you ought to at least understand that that's all you're doing.
🌽 🤙