At 18:15:05 UTC on Saturday 3 January 2009, a block was created that still carries a line from that morning’s edition of The Times of London: “Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”. Anyone can read it today. Type the number 0 into the search box of a block explorer such as mempool.space, open the only transaction in the block, and the sentence is there, sitting next to a reward of 50 bitcoin that has never moved.
That block is the genesis block: block number 0, the first block of the Bitcoin chain. It was not received from the network like every block after it. It is written into the Bitcoin software itself, so every node in the world starts from the same first page, and its 50 BTC reward cannot be spent.
Two other early blocks complete the story. Block 1 followed on 9 January, and block 170, on 12 January, holds the first payment from one person to another on the chain. Around all three sits the 2008 financial crisis, which is why the newspaper sentence is still quoted. Each of these blocks can be opened on an explorer in a minute, and most of what is said about them can be checked there, though not all of it.
If you are new to the subject, start with our guide to what Bitcoin is and the previous lesson of this path, the history of Bitcoin and Satoshi Nakamoto, which follows the project from 2008 to today. Here we stay on the first ten days.
Block 0: the genesis block has no parent
A blockchain is a list of blocks where each one points back to the one before it, using the hash (a kind of fingerprint) of that previous block. Our introduction to blockchain explains the idea. Follow the pointers back from today’s block and you end at a block whose “previous block” field is filled with zeros. There is nothing before it. That block is the genesis block, and every Bitcoin node agrees on it without having to download it from anyone.
The reason is simple: the genesis block is hard-coded. The reference software, today called Bitcoin Core, builds it from fixed values in a source file named chainparams.cpp. One line passes the timestamp 1231006505, the nonce 2083236893, the difficulty bits and a reward of “50 * COIN”, and a line just below checks that the result has exactly the expected hash. A node that computed anything else would refuse to start on the main network. Everything after block 0 has to be built on top of it.
The numbering has one small trap. Modern software calls it block 0, so the block height of the chain is the number of blocks after the genesis. According to the Bitcoin Wiki page on the genesis block, very early versions counted it as block 1. Explorers today all use 0.
Here is what the explorer shows for the genesis block and for the two other blocks of this lesson, as read from the mempool.space API on 23 October 2026. Block times are written by the miner and only loosely checked by the network, so treat them as what the block claims, not as a clock reading.
| Field | Block 0 (genesis) | Block 1 | Block 170 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Date and time (UTC) | 3 January 2009, 18:15:05 | 9 January 2009, 02:54:25 | 12 January 2009, 03:30:25 |
| Unix timestamp | 1231006505 | 1231469665 | 1231731025 |
| Hash (start and end) | 000000000019d6…8ce26f | 00000000839a8e…eb6048 | 00000000d11457…d4a2ee |
| Previous block | none (all zeros) | the genesis block | block 169 |
| Transactions | 1 | 1 | 2 |
| Size | 285 bytes | 215 bytes | 490 bytes |
| Nonce | 2083236893 | 2573394689 | 1889418792 |
| Difficulty | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| New coins in the block | 50 BTC | 50 BTC | 50 BTC (fees: 0) |
A few of these fields need a word. The nonce is the number the miner changed again and again until the block’s hash came out low enough; that search is proof of work. A difficulty of 1 is the lowest Bitcoin has ever had: the starting level, before any adjustment. The 50 BTC is the block reward of the time, which has since been cut in half four times by the halving. And the full genesis hash, 000000000019d6689c085ae165831e934ff763ae46a2a6c172b3f1b60a8ce26f, starts with more zeros than the difficulty of 1 required, a detail people have puzzled over for years.
A later lesson on blocks goes through the header field by field. For now, the field that matters most in block 0 is hidden inside its single transaction.
The genesis block message: a Times headline of 3 January 2009
Every block opens with a special transaction, the coinbase, that creates the new coins and pays them to the miner. It has no real input, because the coins come from nowhere, so the field where an input would normally carry a signature is free. Miners can put almost any bytes in it. Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, put a sentence there.
Read as hexadecimal, the coinbase input of the genesis block starts with a few bytes for the difficulty, then announces 69 bytes of data. Decoded as plain text, those 69 bytes say: “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”. The same string sits in Bitcoin Core’s source under the name pszTimestamp, which already tells you how its author thought of it: as a time stamp.
The headline is real. On the morning of Saturday 3 January 2009 The Times ran a front-page story whose printed headline was a little longer, “Chancellor Alistair Darling on brink of second bailout for banks”, as the economics blog Calculated Risk reproduced it that day. Satoshi’s version drops the minister’s name. The article opened with these words:
“Alistair Darling has been forced to consider a second bailout for banks as the lending drought worsens.” The Times, 3 January 2009, as quoted by Calculated Risk.
The story said the Chancellor of the Exchequer was weighing new cash injections into banks, cheaper state guarantees so they could borrow, or the purchase of their “toxic assets”, possibly through a “bad bank”. The reason given was that the £37 billion the government had put into banks a few months earlier had not got lending going again. A decision was expected within weeks, involving Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Lord Mandelson.
Why quote a newspaper at all? A headline is a proof of “not before”. Nobody could have typed that exact sentence before The Times printed it, so the block cannot have been completed before 3 January 2009. It does not prove the block was made on that day, only that it was not made earlier. That matters because Satoshi, as the only miner at the start, could have mined in private for weeks and then claimed an old date. The quote rules out the “older than it looks” version of that trick.
What the sentence also meant is less certain, and the honest answer is that nobody knows. Satoshi never explained in writing why he chose that headline among all the news of the day. It is often read as a comment on the banking system, and his own words a few weeks later make that reading tempting. On 11 February 2009, presenting Bitcoin on the P2P Foundation forum, he wrote: “The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that’s required to make it work.” He went on to say that banks are trusted to hold our money but lend it out in credit bubbles with little kept in reserve (read the full post).
That post does not mention The Times or the genesis block. So the fair way to put it is this: the headline works as a date stamp, and it is widely read as a statement about bank bailouts; the second part is an interpretation, not something Satoshi confirmed. The Bitcoin Wiki adds a further guess: the British headline suggests Satoshi may have lived in the United Kingdom. That too is a guess.
The 2008 crisis behind the sentence
A second bailout makes sense only if there was a first. When block 0 was created, the financial system of the rich world had just gone through its worst autumn in decades, and governments were spending public money to keep banks standing. Bitcoin’s white paper had been published two months earlier, on 31 October 2008; our lesson on the Bitcoin white paper reads that text in detail. Here is the crisis it was born into, with dates.
United States: from Lehman to TARP
The crisis started in American housing loans and spread through the banks that held them. On 15 September 2008 the investment bank Lehman Brothers decided to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, a step the SEC addressed in a statement that same day. On 16 September the Federal Reserve said it would lend up to $85 billion to the insurer AIG, with the government receiving a 79.9% equity interest in return.
On 3 October 2008 the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act became law. It created the Troubled Asset Relief Program, TARP, and let the Treasury buy or insure troubled assets up to $700 billion outstanding at any one time, released in three steps starting at $250 billion. The Federal Reserve cut its policy rate as well: according to Federal Reserve History, the federal funds target went from 4.5% at the end of 2007 to 2% in early September 2008, and to a range of 0 to 0.25% at the end of 2008.
The cost for ordinary people came later and lasted longer. The same Federal Reserve History essay dates the recession from December 2007 to June 2009, the deepest since the Second World War, with gross domestic product down 4.3% from peak to trough and unemployment rising from under 5% to 10%.
United Kingdom: the bailout The Times was talking about
In Britain, the government announced a package of measures on 8 October 2008 to provide short-term liquidity, new capital for banks and building societies, and a credit guarantee scheme for their borrowing. On 13 October a Treasury statement said the government was putting £37 billion of capital into Royal Bank of Scotland and, once their merger went through, HBOS and Lloyds TSB. That £37 billion is the “first bailout” behind the Times headline: by early January it had not restored lending, and the Chancellor was considering a second round.
France, Italy and the rest of Europe
Continental Europe ran its own rescues in the same weeks. On 13 October 2008 President Nicolas Sarkozy presented a 360 billion euro plan: up to 320 billion of state guarantees for bank refinancing and 40 billion to recapitalise banks through a state holding company. Parliament passed it as the amended finance law of 16 October 2008 on financing the economy. Italy acted later, with decree-law 185 of 29 November 2008, a broad package of anti-crisis measures for families, jobs and businesses converted into law on 28 January 2009. Its article 12 let the Ministry of Economy subscribe financial instruments issued by banks, soon nicknamed “Tremonti bonds” after the finance minister.
| Date | Where | Event |
|---|---|---|
| 15 September 2008 | United States | Lehman Brothers decides to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection |
| 16 September 2008 | United States | The Federal Reserve offers AIG a loan of up to $85 billion |
| 3 October 2008 | United States | The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act creates TARP (up to $700 billion) |
| 8 October 2008 | United Kingdom | Government announces its bank stability package |
| 13 October 2008 | United Kingdom | Treasury commits £37 billion of capital to RBS, HBOS and Lloyds TSB |
| 13 and 16 October 2008 | France | 360 billion euro plan (320 billion of guarantees, 40 billion of capital), then the law |
| 31 October 2008 | Internet | Satoshi Nakamoto publishes the Bitcoin white paper |
| 29 November 2008 | Italy | Decree-law 185 of anti-crisis measures, including state subscription of bank instruments |
| End of 2008 | United States | Federal funds target at 0 to 0.25% |
| 3 January 2009 | United Kingdom / Bitcoin | The Times reports a possible second bailout; block 0 carries the headline |
You do not need to know how banks work to read the genesis block, but it helps. Our guide to how banks create money explains why a bank can lend more than it holds, which is the mechanism Satoshi criticised in his February post. The lesson on fiat money and central banks covers what a central bank does when it cuts rates to zero.
Why the 50 bitcoin of the genesis block are unspendable
Block 0’s coinbase pays 5,000,000,000 satoshis, or 50 BTC, to a public key that begins 04678afdb0fe55. The output is an ordinary pay-to-public-key output, the same kind every block reward used at the time. Nothing in the script itself locks it. Yet those 50 coins can never be spent, by anyone.
The cause is a quirk of how the software treats block 0. Because the genesis block is built in code instead of being received and processed like a normal block, its transaction was never added to the database of spendable coins that every node keeps. A comment in Bitcoin Core states it plainly: the output “cannot be spent since it did not originally exist in the database”. If someone tried to spend it, every node would look for the coin, not find it, and reject the transaction.
Was that deliberate? Again, nobody knows. The Bitcoin Wiki says: “It is not known if this was done intentionally or accidentally.” Changing it now would require every node to accept a new rule, and nobody has a reason to push for that.
The key also has an address form, 1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa, and people have been sending small amounts to it for years as a kind of tribute. On 23 October 2026 the mempool.space page for that address counted 81,035 incoming outputs worth 5,768,650,364 satoshis in total, about 57.69 BTC, and not one spent output. Fifty of those bitcoin are the original reward. The rest, roughly 7.7 BTC, arrived later from other people; that they are tributes is our reading of the pattern, as the senders are not named. Unlike the reward, those later coins are ordinary outputs. Only someone holding the private key for that address could move them, and no one has, as of October 2026.
How much is the genesis block worth? In bitcoin, the answer is fixed: 50 BTC of reward that cannot move, plus the tributes. In dollars it changes every minute, and Coindaro does not print a live price as a fact; the Bitcoin page shows the current rate, so multiply it yourself.
Block 1, six days later
The next block in the chain, block 1, carries the timestamp 9 January 2009, 02:54:25 UTC. That is six days later by the calendar (3 to 9 January), or exactly 5 days, 8 hours, 39 minutes and 20 seconds after block 0. On a network designed to produce a block about every ten minutes, that gap is enormous, and it has never been explained by Satoshi.
One fact sits right in the middle of it. On 8 January 2009 at 19:27:40 UTC Satoshi sent an email to the cryptography mailing list titled “Bitcoin v0.1 released” (archived by the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute). It announced “a new electronic cash system that uses a peer-to-peer network” and offered the software for download. Block 1 came about seven and a half hours later. A natural reading is that the network as we know it started with the public release, and block 0 had been prepared earlier. That is an inference from the dates; Satoshi did not say so.
The Bitcoin Wiki lists three hypotheses for the gap, all unproven. In the first, Satoshi had been working on Bitcoin for some time and the front page of The Times prompted him to put it out. In the second, he spent the six days mining block 0 under the same timestamp, which would fit its unusually low hash. In the third, called the prenet hypothesis, block 0 was solved on 3 January, then test blocks were mined on top of it and thrown away before the real chain restarted on 9 January. None of the three can be checked from the chain alone.
Block 1 is plain. Its single transaction is a coinbase of 50 BTC paid to a public key that starts 0496b538e853519c; its coinbase input holds only the difficulty bytes and no message at all. The newspaper headline appears in block 0 and nowhere else. Who mined block 1 is not written anywhere either. It is generally assumed to be Satoshi, since he was the only person known to be running the software that night, and researchers have attributed many of the earliest blocks to a single miner presumed to be him; the previous lesson discusses those estimates. On chain, though, the key carries no name.
Block 1 also shows that the famous ten-minute rhythm is an average the network steers toward, not a rule each block obeys. With almost nobody mining in January 2009, gaps of hours were common. The difficulty only starts adjusting after the first 2,016 blocks, so for the first weeks it stayed at 1.
Block 170 and the first transaction to Hal Finney
Retellings of Bitcoin’s first days often place the first transaction to Hal Finney in block 1. It is not there, and the mix-up is common. Block 1 holds only its own reward. The payment to Finney is in block 170, timestamped 12 January 2009 at 03:30:25 UTC, which was still the evening of Sunday 11 January on the US West Coast. Block 170 came three days and 36 minutes after block 1.
Block 170 contains two transactions. The first is its own 50 BTC reward. The second, with the identifier f4184fc596403b9d638783cf57adfe4c75c605f6356fbc91338530e9831e9e16, spends coins that had been created three days earlier as the reward of block 9, mined on 9 January at 03:54:39 UTC, about an hour after block 1. Here is that transaction in plain terms.
| Part | Amount | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Input | 50 BTC | The reward of block 9, paid to a key starting 0411db93e1dc |
| Output 1 | 10 BTC | Sent to a new key starting 04ae1a62fe09, the one Hal Finney described as his |
| Output 2 | 40 BTC | Back to the key starting 0411db93e1dc: the change |
| Fee | 0 BTC | No fee was needed in January 2009 |
The structure is the one every bitcoin payment still follows: a whole earlier output is consumed, one part goes to the recipient, and the rest returns to the sender as change. Our guide to how crypto transactions work explains why coins move in whole outputs like this. The scripts inside the outputs are left to a later lesson on keys.
The chain itself names nobody. Our link between the 10 BTC output and Hal Finney comes from Finney himself. On 19 March 2013 he wrote a long post on the Bitcointalk forum (read it in full) that included this sentence: “I was the recipient of the first bitcoin transaction, when Satoshi sent ten coins to me as a test.” In the same post he wrote: “I think I was the first person besides Satoshi to run bitcoin.” He also recalled mining “block 70-something” in those first days.
Finney was no newcomer. In the same post he recalls working on an early version of PGP, the encryption program, with Phil Zimmermann, running the first cryptographic anonymous remailer for the Cypherpunks mailing list, and trying to build his own proof-of-work currency, RPOW, years before Bitcoin. He says he downloaded the software as soon as Satoshi announced it, and spent the following days emailing him bug reports.
Is block 170 the first transaction ever? Every block has its reward transaction, so in a strict sense the first transaction is the coinbase of block 0. For payments, the chain gives a clear answer: on 23 October 2026 we read the transaction count of blocks 0 to 179 from the mempool.space API, and block 170 is the first with more than one. The payment to Finney is the first transaction on the chain that is not a block reward.
How to look at these blocks yourself
You do not need a wallet, an account or any software for this. A block explorer reads the public chain and shows it in a browser. The steps below use mempool.space; any other explorer shows the same data because it reads the same chain.
- Open mempool.space and type 0 in the search box at the top, then confirm. You land on the genesis block page.
- Check the hash at the top of the page: it should begin with ten zeros followed by 19d6689c. Compare the timestamp with the table in this lesson.
- Scroll to the transaction list. There is one transaction. Open it and look at the input, labelled coinbase: the explorer shows the raw bytes and, in most views, their text, including the Times headline.
- Look at the output: 50 BTC to a pay-to-public-key script, shown as unspent.
- Go back to the search box and type 1 to open block 1. Note the “previous block” hash: it is the genesis hash. There is no message in its coinbase.
- Type 170 to open block 170. Open its second transaction and you will see one input of 50 BTC and two outputs of 10 and 40 BTC.
- For a second opinion, open the same blocks in another explorer and compare the hashes. They must match to the last character.
One caution while you are there: an explorer is a read-only window. No legitimate explorer asks for your seed phrase or a payment to “unlock” anything. If a site that looks like one does, close it.
What the genesis block proves and what it does not
Because block 0 is so often quoted, a lot of claims get attached to it. Sorting them is a good exercise in reading a primary source.
It proves that the first block of the chain could not have been completed before 3 January 2009, because it quotes that day’s paper. It proves that the chain everyone runs today starts from that exact block: the hash is checked in the software. And it proves that its 50 BTC have never been spent, since every node can confirm the output is still absent from the set of spendable coins.
It does not prove the block was made on 3 January rather than a few days later. The timestamp is a number the miner writes, and the network only checks it loosely.
It is not a signed manifesto. The 69 bytes are a newspaper headline, nothing else, with no signature and no commentary. Reading a political message into it is an interpretation; it may be a correct one, and Satoshi’s February post points in that direction, but it is still an interpretation.
It says nothing about who Satoshi was. The choice of a London paper has led to guesses about where he lived, but the key that received the reward is not linked to any name, and no signature made with that key has ever been published.
And the unspendable coins are not “Satoshi’s lost fortune”. They could never be spent by anyone. Whatever Satoshi still holds, if anything, sits in the outputs of later blocks, which is a separate question.
The full chronology from 2008 to now, with the events that came after these first blocks, is in our crypto history timeline.
The crisis, seen from the United States and the United Kingdom
Seen from America, the genesis block belongs to the weeks after TARP: it carries a date exactly three months after the rescue law was signed, with the Federal Reserve’s target rate already near zero.
British readers have a more direct link still: the sentence in the block is about the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the banks the Treasury had just recapitalised with £37 billion. The Times story itself is a piece of British political history.
The history does not change how Bitcoin is treated today. In the United Kingdom, the FCA’s consumer page on crypto, updated on 29 January 2026, still warns that anyone who decides to invest “should be prepared to lose all the money you have invested”, and that compensation through the Financial Services Compensation Scheme is highly unlikely. This lesson is history, not a reason to buy or sell anything.
A later lesson on blocks opens the header of a block field by field, starting from the fields read here on block 0.
