https://ift.tt/3sNqHNw 13th anniversary of the Genesis Block

Today marks the 13th anniversary of the “birth” of Bitcoin: on 3 January 2009 the first block of the Bitcoin blockchain, the so-called Genesis Block, was mined. 

The first mined Bitcoin

Block number zero was mined by Satoshi Nakamoto at 6:15 PM UTC. 

It contained a single transaction, the coinbase transaction, which effectively created the first 50 BTC allocated to the public address 1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa. 

This address, surely belonging to Satoshi Nakamoto, never spent its BTC, and continued to receive them even after that 3 January 2009 thanks to numerous donations made by many users over the years. 

In fact, after the 50 BTC he received on 3 January, he received 3,182 more transactions, the first of which was for 0.01 BTC on 13 May 2011, and the last for 0.00000558 BTC received today. 

Nakamoto used a different address to collect the reward for each block he mined, so he has thousands of addresses. It doesn’t appear that he ever spent a single BTC of the more than 1.1 million he supposedly mined, not least because he has disappeared since late 2010. It is worth noting that the first transaction he received from other users on his first address was about five months after his disappearance. 

13th anniversary for Bitcoin’s Genesis Block

Bitcoin’s blockchain itself is thirteen years old today, and is by far the longest-lived blockchain, as Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency in the world to be invented. 

During these thirteen years, the value of BTC on the market has grown a lot. 

Initially, it had virtually no value because it was not in fact tradable on any market. So the BTC mined by Nakamoto had no market value. 

However, already in the following year, 2010, the first trades began to take place, at a price of around $0.05.

In 2011, the price had already reached a high of $32, while in 2012 the maximum price stopped at $15. The first big boom came in 2013, when it peaked at over $1,100. 

It is worth noting that Bitcoin’s Genesis Block is also the zero block of the blockchains of BCH (Bitcoin Cash) and BSV (Bitcoin Satoshi’s Vision), whose path however completely separated from that of Bitcoin in August 2017. 

Satoshi Nakamoto’s message

In the Genesis Block Satoshi Nakamoto wrote a textual message: 

 “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”. 

This was the title of an article in the British newspaper The Times of that day, referring to the reactions of the mainstream banking and financial system to the crisis triggered the previous year by subprime mortgages and the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers. 

Even today, thirteen years later, Bitcoin remains a defence against those same measures, of which the expansive monetary policy that generates inflation is surely the most obvious one.