"The Secret History of Bitcoin": Things You Don't Know About the Bitcoin Genesis Block

Around 6:15 pm Greenwich time on January 3, 2009, the Bitcoin Genesis Block was generated in a small server in Helsinki, the Netherlands, marking the official birth of Bitcoin. The sentence left by Satoshi Nakamoto on the block, "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks", is still repeatedly mentioned and speculated as a clue to find Satoshi Nakamoto.

Bitcoin's founding block information and the cover photo of the Times on January 3, 2009 (Image source: Blockchain)

As if to keep it as a souvenir, Satoshi Nakamoto also left 50 bitcoins in the genesis block that can never be spent. As mentioned at the beginning of the article, the genesis block does not point to the hash value of the previous block. It is forcibly generated in a hard-coded form and is not included in the transaction database; therefore, all subsequent transactions on the Bitcoin chain cannot reference this block. To put it bluntly, the 50 BTC block reward in the genesis address cannot be transferred out.

Genesis block source code

This may be one of the reasons why this address has never initiated a transaction. However, the balance of the Genesis address is more than 50 BTC; to this day, many enthusiasts continue to transfer very small amounts of Bitcoin into it, perhaps to express respect for Satoshi Nakamoto, or to allow Satoshi Nakamoto to have a balance to transfer out when he wants to prove his identity.

Genesis address information (Image source: btc.com)

What’s even more interesting is that if we broaden our horizons, we can find interesting things between Block#0 and Block#1. The Genesis Block was hard-coded by Satoshi Nakamoto, and Block#1 was the first block actually generated through mining; however, according to the timestamp, it took Satoshi Nakamoto not ten minutes as we know, but six days to mine Block#1. From January 3 to January 9, it took Satoshi Nakamoto a full six days to mine Block#1; coincidentally, when God created the world, he also took six days to create everything in the world.