Genesis block
Bitcoin's genesis block is created
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Original prompt & settings (JSON) ↗The genesis transaction says 50 BTC — and those 50 coins cannot be spent.
3 January 2009, 18:15:05 UTC
Bitcoin's pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, created the chain's genesis block on 3 January 2009 — block height 0, containing no previous-block hash. Its header records Unix time 1231006505, which corresponds to 18:15:05 UTC.
The canonical block hash begins with nineteen zeroes: 000000000019d6689c085ae165831e934ff763ae46a2a6c172b3f1b60a8ce26f.
A newspaper headline inside the block
The block's coinbase input carries the text "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks." That establishes the block could not have been made before that newspaper date.
It proves an earliest possible date, not Nakamoto's nationality, location or political intentions. The symbolic intent behind the choice is undocumented; reading it as a manifesto is inference.
Fifty coins that cannot move
The block holds a single generation transaction nominally worth 50 BTC. Bitcoin Core documents that this output cannot be spent, because it did not originally enter the transaction database.
A public, continuously operating network did not demonstrably begin at that instant. The public Bitcoin v0.1 release announcement followed several days later — Nakamoto described it as alpha, experimental, open-source software using a peer-to-peer network with no central server — and block 1 appeared roughly six days after the genesis block.
Sources
Researched 23 Aug 2026 5 sources 2 audit passes
How this was checked
Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →
What the sources leave uncertain
- The date is strongly supported by the embedded Times headline and the block's timestamp, but a miner-selected timestamp is not an independently witnessed creation time. The headline proves the block was not created before January 3; it does not by itself prove the exact second.
- Calling the block “mined” is conventional. Its finalized parameters were subsequently hard-coded into the client, and the surviving record cannot reveal every step by which Nakamoto generated and tested it.
- The precise symbolic intent of the banking headline is undocumented. It works as a lower-bound timestamp; interpreting it as a political manifesto remains inference.