IN THE BEGINNING, SATOSHI CREATED BITCOIN

Every act of creation has its genesis moment and Bitcoin’s came wrapped in enough biblical symbolism to fill, well, a Bible. Indeed, it’s easy to get so lost in the mythology to overlook the fact that this was, from a technical perspective, a network launch. So let’s start with the basic facts.

On January 3rd, 2009 at approximately 18:15:05 UTC, Satoshi Nakamoto mined block 0, officially launching the Bitcoin network. Since this was the genesis block, there was no previous block header to append to it and there was just one transaction to include: the coinbase tx awarding 50 BTC to its finder. Bitcoin was a ghost town and the only spectre lurking there was its shadowy creator.

But the most famous thing about the genesis block isn’t its technical peculiarities, such as the fact that its hash value starts with two additional hex zeroes, proving that it was even harder to mine than subsequent blocks. Rather, it’s the message that Satoshi embedded in its coinbase data, which contains the following ASCII text: “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.”

On face value, this was merely a timestamp to prove that the block was mined on the same day as the newspaper was published. But of course there was a deeper meaning to the inclusion of this headline over all others: it was a statement of intent. A marker that Bitcoin was designed as the antithesis of everything that mainstream finance stood for. Verifiable. Auditable. And immune to the sort of financial crises that might mandate a bailout. Bitcoin was going it alone and would stand or fall on its own terms. Physical copies of The Times from January 3rd, 2009 have since become collector’s items.

As for the journalist who wrote the article, Times Deputy Political Editor Francis Elliot, he recalls tweeting his surprise at learning his headline had been encoded in the genesis block. “Then a load of bitcoiners reacted to my tweet,” he adds, “and threw me some coins which I had the good sense to collect and put into a digital wallet.”

Indelible and Unspendable

One of the other curious things about the genesis block is that its coinbase reward cannot be spent due to the way Satoshi coded it. This could have been an oversight on Satoshi’s part, but knowing the extreme rigour he applied to everything, it’s far more likely to have been a deliberate decision. A means of signaling that he wasn’t in this for his own financial gain. The genesis block was the pledge that he would never cash out. He was in it for the tech, not the money.

In the years since its publication, genesis block lore has become a field of study in its own right as analysts pore over its design in search of easter eggs and symbology hinting at the intentions of its God-like creator. All that can be said for certain is that with this gentle nudge, Satoshi got the ball rolling and Bitcoin has been picking up pace ever since. Meanwhile, Satoshi’s first BTC address that appeared in the genesis block has become a message board of sorts, with people sending it not just coins but also data in OP_RETURN outputs in homage or for attention.

The genesis block was emptier than any other Bitcoin block in history. And yet it’s filled with tantalising trivia that continues to enthrall Bitcoin historians to this day.