The genesis block holds a wealth of significance and yet many mysteries.
We could talk of the unique data it houses, or debate about why it’s blocked reward remain unspendable or the mysterious creation time between Block 0 and Block 1 and more fascinating, the embed text which was later decrypted in the hex data of the block.
This post features the 2nd part “The mystery between block 0 and block 1 creation time” of the series “The Bitcoin Genesis Block”
By combining cryptography with other techniques, Satoshi was able to solve the major problems that marred the early rise of digital money — double spending.
Ensuring coins have an authentic history of spending without being spent twice.
In other to avoid the corrupt practice of the central authority ability to print money endlessly. Satoshi pre-set the total number of bitcoin that could ever be created at 21 million, leaving the fate of the currency to itself.
This number was configured to be gradually released via block rewards. The initial reward was set at 50 bitcoins and is set to half every block 210,000 — an event which takes place every four years.
Let there be!
Every 10 minutes, the bitcoin blockchain reaches consensus and produce a new block containing newly added data and coins. This was the rule of disbursement, but a strange phenomenon occurs violating this rule right from the onset, feeding the world with an undetermined reason of action which has seen many arguments and suggestions erupted.
Instead of the set 10 minutes to produce a new block. The creation of block 1 took six good days. How in the world this happened? No one could tell!.
We have seen many interpretations of this occurrence.
Some theorized that Nakamoto spent six days mining the original block as a test of the system in order to ensure its credibility, then backdated the timestamp to correlate with the date the media publisher “Times” released the news he embedded in the hex data of the block.
Others relate it with the biblical creation of the earth by God which took six days to be completed, adding further meaning to why the block was so named and further stating the beginning of the creation of a new world — free of censorships and corruptions.
A bitcoin.org discussion expresses some logical view about this occurrence in a technical way, suggesting what might have happened.
Majority of which I as a person do not understand as I am not a tech-savvy individual.
You could read up the thread.
The reason behind why it took six days between block 0 and 1 could not be outright understood unless there is a direct comment from the creator of the mysterious digital object of value.
Which is unlikely to be known since Satoshi has never resurfaced since he disappeared in 2011.
Nevertheless, we could continue speculating and keep the guessing game going but one thing is for sure.
“Block 0 holds a lot of mystery”.
Watch out for a more interesting part “A vision claim to a new financial world” of this fantastic series “The Bitcoin Genesis Block”
Reference:
https://www.blockchainsemantics.com/blog/genesis-block/
This post also appears on my Trybe blog.