Bitcoin emerged in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, when trust in traditional banking was at an all-time low. The Great Recession of 2008 exposed the risky lending practices of banks, which started collapsing like a house of cards.
During this turmoil, Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, published the whitepaper Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System in a cryptography mailing list on October 31, 2008. The whitepaper proposed a transaction mechanism where the transacting parties do not need to trust each other or any central authority, such as a bank.
Without a central entity verifying all transactions, ensuring that no cryptocurrency is spent more than once was a difficult challenge. Nakamoto solved it with blockchain, a form of distributed ledger technology, which recorded all transactions and was controlled by groups of miners, instead of a centralized authority. Transactions were grouped into “blocks” — with the very first block called the Genesis Block.
The Genesis Block
Bitcoin went from being a concept to an experiment three months later on January 3, 2009, when Nakamoto mined the very first Bitcoin block—also known as the Genesis Block, or Block 0. This makes the Genesis Block the ancestor of every Bitcoin block in existence today.
Unlike the specialized mining devices used currently, Nakamoto used a CPU to mine the Genesis Block and received 50 Bitcoin tokens as mining rewards. At the time, Nakamoto was the sole miner, and with no competition, the mining difficulty was a paltry 1, compared to the current 67.31 trillion. Mining difficulty, adjusted approximately every two weeks, refers to how much work it takes miners to mine one Bitcoin block.
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Miners are currently rewarded with 6.25 Bitcoin for mining each block, and that number is scheduled to be reduced by half to 3.125 sometime next April as part of an event that occurs every four years called the halving.
There are three things of note about the first Bitcoin block. First, the initial 50 Bitcoins mined can never be moved, utilized, or spent, as per Nakamoto’s instructions.
The Genesis Block recorded only one transaction in which the mining rewards were distributed to a particular address and can never be moved. This is because the Genesis Block used a non-standard scripting language, which did not include spending instructions. In other words, the structure of the transaction output in the Genesis Block is a special case that differs from other Bitcoin transactions, rendering the initial 50 BTC effectively locked and inoperable.
Second, Nakamoto mysteriously embedded a message in the first block, which reads, “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.” The message refers to the headline of the London newspaper, The Times, on the noted date. The article stated that the UK government was preparing to bail out banks for the second time.
Although Nakamoto never explicitly shared his opinions about the financial system, many believe that the message was a commentary on the fragility and corruption of the banking system.
The third and final mystery surrounding the Genesis Block is the time gap between the first and second blocks. The second Bitcoin block was mined on January 8, five days after the first block. This is curious since it takes only 10 minutes to mine a Bitcoin block.
Some theorize that Nakamoto spent six days testing the stability of the network before mining Block 1, and Block 1 was actually backdated. However, a few others believe that Nakamoto was trying to recreate the story of God’s creation of Earth, which took six days, as per the Bible.
The Genesis Block holds historical significance because it marks the beginning of the cryptocurrency that has reached a market cap of hundreds of billions of dollars. Some enthusiasts even keep sending Bitcoins to the original unspendable address where Nakamoto sent the first 50 coins, as a tribute.
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While Nakamoto kept mining BTC for several years, the enigmatic creator disappeared in 2011. Nakamoto’s identity remains a mystery to this day.
Bitcoin’s Evolution
Since the Genesis Block was mined, Bitcoin’s code has undergone several upgrades and improvements to enhance security, scalability, efficiency, and functionality. For instance, the Stacks blockchain, a scaling solution, brought smart contract functionality to the Bitcoin network.
Nakamoto also enhanced the network’s scalability by increasing the block size to 1 MB in 2010. The implementation of Segregated Witness (SegWit) in 2017, which separated transaction signature data from transaction data, effectively increased the block size and added more scalability.
More recent innovations include the Bitcoin Ordinals, which provides users with a new way to store data, text, and images on the network. It allows users to trade Inscriptions, similar to non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
Therefore, the Bitcoin network currently handles transactions very differently than the Genesis Block. Even with the upgrades, however, developers have ensured compatibility with the Genesis Block to honor its role in Bitcoin’s history and preserve it as a historical artifact.
