Bitcoin's Genesis Block: January 3, 2009, Where It All Starts

At 18:15:05 UTC on 3 January 2009, by its own timestamp, the first block of Bitcoin came into existence. Its creator, who used the name Satoshi Nakamoto, wrote a line of text into it: "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks." It was the front-page headline of that morning's Times of London, about the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, preparing a second rescue for the banks after the 2008 crash.

The block paid its maker 50 new bitcoin, worth nothing at the time. They still sit where they were created and can never be spent. At bitcoin's mid-October 2026 price of about $82,000, according to CoinGecko, they would be worth about $4.1 million. Since that day more than 971,000 blocks have been stacked on top of it, and about 20.1 million bitcoin have been created. Every one of them traces back to block 0, known as the genesis block.

What a block is

Bitcoin's ledger, the blockchain, is a public record of every payment, kept by thousands of computers instead of a bank. Payments are grouped into pages called blocks, and each new page carries a fingerprint of the one before, so the pages cannot be reordered or quietly edited without redoing all the work since. Adding a page is called mining: computers compete to solve a numerical puzzle, and the winner gets to add the block and collect new coins as payment.

The first entry in every block is the payment that creates those new coins, known as the coinbase transaction (nothing to do with Coinbase, the US exchange, which took its name from it years later). It has a small free-text field. Satoshi used the genesis block's field for the Times headline.

The headline did two jobs. It proved the block could not have been made before 3 January, since nobody could quote a newspaper that did not yet exist, much like a kidnapper holding up today's paper. It also told readers what the project was for. Britain had already put £37 billion into its banks in October 2008. On 19 January 2009, Darling announced the second rescue the Times had predicted. Bitcoin's pitch was money that no chancellor, central bank or commercial bank could print or bail out.

The coins nobody can touch

The genesis block's 50 coins are unspendable because of a quirk in the code. The software never added that first payment to its list of coins that can be spent, so even Satoshi's own key could not move them. Whether this was deliberate is still argued: some read it as a symbolic cornerstone, others as an early oversight that nobody has wanted to fix.

The address that received those coins has become a shrine. People have sent it tens of thousands of small tribute payments over the years. The Blockstream and Blockchain.com block explorers both show more than 57 bitcoin received on top of the original 50, worth about $4.7 million in October 2026. Those later coins could in principle be moved by whoever holds Satoshi's key. Nobody has.

The first users

The idea came first. On 31 October 2008, about seven weeks after the bank Lehman Brothers collapsed, Satoshi posted a nine-page paper titled "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" to the same small cryptography mailing list. It described how strangers could agree on one record of who owns what without a bank in the middle. Most of the replies were sceptical. The first reply, from list member James A. Donald, said such a system was badly needed but doubted it could grow to the size required. Two months later Satoshi shipped the code anyway.

The timestamps show a six-day gap. Block 1 was mined at 02:54 UTC on 9 January 2009. Hours earlier, on 8 January US time, Satoshi had announced Bitcoin version 0.1 on a cryptography mailing list, describing "a new electronic cash system that uses a peer-to-peer network to prevent double-spending." The software ran only on Windows.

Hal Finney, a Californian cryptographer and veteran of the 1990s "cypherpunk" movement for digital privacy, downloaded it at once. On 10 January he replied on the mailing list to congratulate Satoshi and, the same day, posted two words on Twitter: "Running bitcoin." The block explorers date block 170 to 03:30 UTC on 12 January 2009, the evening of 11 January in California. It carried the first payment from one person to another: Satoshi sent Finney 10 bitcoin.

Satoshi stayed for about two years, then withdrew. The last public forum posts date from December 2010 and the last known emails from April 2011. Blockchain researcher Sergio Demian Lerner has estimated, from patterns in the early blocks, that Satoshi mined about 1.1 million bitcoin. None of those coins has moved.

Not quite unbreakable

Bitcoin's record since 3 January 2009 is long but not spotless. On 15 August 2010 a bug let someone create about 184 billion bitcoin out of nothing in block 74,638. Satoshi and the other developers released a fix and the network abandoned the bad block within about five hours. In March 2013 a software upgrade accidentally split the chain in two for several hours until developers told miners to roll back. The network has never been hacked in the way exchanges are, but it has needed humans to rescue it twice.

The headline at the top of the chain has not changed, and never can. The block is the fixed first page that every copy of the Bitcoin software in the world still checks against.