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Genesis block message Updated 2025-07-16

Inscription added by Satoshi Nakamoto on the Genesis block containing:

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

which is a reference to: www.thetimes.co.uk/article/chancellor-alistair-darling-on-brink-of-second-bailout-for-banks-n9l382mn62h wihch is fully titled:

Chancellor Alistair Darling on brink of second bailout for banks

The "Alistair" was slikely removed due to limited payload concerns.

Through the newspaper reference, the message proves a minimal starting date for the first mine.

And it hints that one of Bitcoin's motivation was the financial crisis of 2007-2008, where banks were given bailouts by the government to not go under, which many people opposed as the crisis was their own fault in the first place. A notable related stab is taken at Len Sassaman tribute.

We can extract the image from the blockchain ourselves by starting from: blockchain.info/block-height/0?format=json.

From that page we manually extract the hash 000000000019d6689c085ae165831e934ff763ae46a2a6c172b3f1b60a8ce26f and then:

wget -O 0.hex https://blockchain.info/block/000000000019d6689c085ae165831e934ff763ae46a2a6c172b3f1b60a8ce26f?format=hex
xxd -p -r 0.hex

and that does contain the famous genesis block string:

EThe Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks

The JSON clarifies that the data is encoded in the script field of the transaction input:

{
      {
         "script":"04ffff001d0104455468652054696d65732030332f4a616e2f32303039204368616e63656c6c6f72206f6e206272696e6b206f66207365636f6e64206261696c6f757420666f722062616e6b73"

The extra E (0x45 in ASCII) in EThe Times is just extra noise required by the script, we can break things up as:

04ffff001d0104 45 5468652054696d65732030332f4a616e2f32303039204368616e63656c6c6f72206f6e206272696e6b206f66207365636f6e64206261696c6f757420666f722062616e6b73

where:

54 is T
the 04ffff001d0104 part just doesn't show up on the terminal because it is not made of any printable characters.

The initial 04 is OP_RETURN.

TODO what is actual the meaning of the ffff001d010445 part? @defango twitter.com/defango/status/1642750851134652417 comments:

04ffff001d0104 is a hexadecimal string. It is commonly used in the Bitcoin network as a part of the mining process. Specifically, it is used as the target value for a block to be considered valid by the Bitcoin network.
This value represents the level of difficulty required for a miner to generate a block that meets the network's criteria. The first four bytes, 04ffff, represent the maximum possible target value. The next three bytes, 001d01, represent the current difficulty level
while the final byte, 04, is a padding byte. In summary, this value sets the difficulty level for mining a new block in the Bitcoin network.

TODO the output of the transaction has a jumbled script, likely just a regular output to get things going, can't be arbitrary like input.