Coin Values and Units

Coin values (and the total market value) of cryptocurrencies vary widely. Bitcoin (BTC) is obviously the largest in market capitalization, at around US$20B, and also the highest price per unit (~US$1200). The next most valuable coin type is Ethereum (ETH), which is under US$2B; after that there are some at a few hundred million and then they drop quickly. Market capitalization for most all coins are displayed at CoinMarketCap. Price per unit for cryptocurrencies are typically less than US$1. A very common currency, Dogecoin (DOGE), is valued at $0.0002 per unit; however due to its large supply of over one hundred billion coins it is one of the top in market cap (#19) despite that price. [Note: prices and market capitalizations are as of March 2017.]

Cryptocurrencies use metric like prefixes for multiples or divisions of coin units. For example with BTC, there are centiBitcoin (0.01), milliBitcoin (0.001), microBitcoin (0.000001), and kiloBitcoin (1000). There is a special term created for the smallest unit of BTC possible on the network, called the satoshi (sat for short) which is 1x10^-8 (0.00000001). When using faucets for acquiring free coins, the satoshi is most commonly used. You will need one hundred million satoshi to equal one full Bitcoin. Most other coin types use this same unit of measurement and use the same term of satoshi, although Litecoin (LTC) sometimes uses litoshi and DOGE will use dogeoshi. Ethereum deviates with the smallest unit being 1x10^-18 (called a wei). The typical unit used on faucets is a gwei, 1x10^-9. This causes confusion among faucets, as they will report in satoshis (or even give the value claimed in decimal as 1x10^-8), but the ePay microwallet, for example, records the values as 1x10^-9. It is unclear why this so, and ePay is either unable or unwilling to clear up the cause of this confusion as noted in this article.