The smallest unit of Ethereum.

[Becky666]

Was just asking a friend who has been into cryptocurrency that, what is the smallest unit of Ethereum and he said Gwei, that makes me confused and quickly do a little research to found out that, it was not Gwei rather Wei, so, i deem it fit to share it here for others to get the correct smallest unit of Ethereum before they mislead others.

As much as Bitcoin smallest unit is 1 Satoshi also is Ethereum which is 1 Wei, but most Ethereum enthusiast haven’t gotten to know about this smallest unit. This Wei can be represented mathematically as 1x10^-18 ETH, which mean 1 Wei = 0.000000000000000001 ETH Smallest unit. Also remember that, Ethereum has 11 known units and the most used units are Wei, Gwei, and Ether.

Source

[Pmalek]

The user bitmover made a good thread about a similar topic a few months ago.
I had to search a lot to find it but here is his post. I think it's useful for this discussion.

Some time ago I participated in an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) and they defined the following parameters for Eth contributions:
Maximum Gas Price: 50 Gwei
Gas Limit: 150 000
I made a little research to learn what these attributes means.

Gwei, Wei and Ether are different unit measures of the same thing.
1 Ether = 1.000.000.000.000.000.000 Wei
1 Wei is the smallest unit of Ether, as 1 Satoshi (0.00000001 BTC) is the smallest of Bitcoin.

All computational work of running Smartcontracts or transactions in the Ethereum Network are paid in Ether (Eth), which is the fuel of that network.
Gas is a unit of measuring this computation work, which is usually measured in Gwei.
Some amount of Gas is charged for every computational operation in the Etehreum Network. For example, and addition costs 5 Gas.

Gas Limit and Gas Price attributes define the total cost of your transactions, according to the formula below:

gas limit * gas price

Gas Price: Amount of Gwei you are willing to spend per unit of gas.
Gas Limit: Maximum amount of units of gas you are willing to spend on a transaction.

From my ICO example, if the Gas Price is 50 Gwei and the Gas Limit is 150.000, this transaction will cost 7.500.000 Gwei (or 0.0075 Eth).

To determine what is the gas price, just check out this website
https://ethgasstation.info/

[bitmover]

Ethereum has 11 known units and the most used units are Wei, Gwei, and Ether.

Take a look at all ethereum units, they are many and have many names:

source: https://etherconverter.online/ and https://steemit.com/ethereum/@gkucmierz/ethereum-how-to-calculate-gas-cost

Thanks for mentioning my topic Pmalek.

[Becky666]

Thanks, they are actually helpful to me especially the decimals .

[nakamura12]

I never thought that there are more smaller units than gwei before until I found this thread.  It's also what I think as I haven't have a complete research about ethereum and what are the smaller units of ethereum called. At first, I thought that gwei is the smallest unit for ethereum because when sending tokens or eth it is gwei that is always used to determine on how much eth we have to pay for every transaction you've made and that makes me wrong thinking that gwei is the small unit there is in ethereum because it's always used to know how much the transaction fee would be.

[pooya87]

Thanks, they are actually helpful to me especially the decimals .

technically there are no "decimals" in cryptocurrencies. what we have under the hood is simple integers, in this case a 64 bit unsigned integer. for example at code level there is no 0.001 bitcoin or 1 bitcoin. there are only 100000 satoshi and 100000000 satoshi, same with ethereum.

[ONEnergy]

Thank you for that, i did thought about what is the name of smaller units of ETH equivalent to BTC sat but never got into it to research.

It is first time i hear about finney and szabo

[bitmover]

It is first time i hear about finney and szabo

They are personalities in the computer science field. Hal Finney and Nick Szabo.
Finney received the first BTC transaction from Satoshi.

From Wikipedia

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Finney_(computer_scientist)
Harold Thomas Finney II (May 4, 1956 – August 28, 2014) was a developer for PGP Corporation, and was the second developer hired after Phil Zimmermann. In his early career, he was credited as lead developer on several console games. He also was an early Bitcoin contributor and received the first bitcoin transaction from Bitcoin's creator Satoshi Nakamoto.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Szabo
Nick Szabo is a computer scientist, legal scholar[1] and cryptographer known for his research in digital contracts and digital currency. He graduated from the University of Washington in 1989 with a degree in computer science[2] and received a law degree from George Washington University Law School.[3] He holds an honorary professorship at the Universidad Francisco Marroquín.[4]