Block Zero
Ten years ago today, Satoshi Nakamoto mined the genesis block, embedding a headline from The Times into Bitcoin's first transaction: "Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks". Timestamp and thesis in one sentence.
In 2009, Chancellor Alistair Darling was considering a second £37 billion injection into British banks. Satoshi responded by launching a system that doesn't need bailing out.
Five years ago, I tried to get my hands on original copies of that edition. Three came from Historic Newspapers, ordered in December 2013. A fourth came from Bygone News in January 2014 - the last copy they had. The fifth came through Bitcointalk. A UK seller named jonny1000 had posted his copy on January 3rd, 2014, Bitcoin's fifth anniversary. He'd originally listed it at 0.1 BTC. By the time he'd finished calling the archive services to try to source more for buyers, the price had changed. He called three companies. All three told him January 3rd, 2009 had sold out in the last few days due to, as he put it, "something to do with Bitcoin and extremely high demand".
The scramble was widespread. GettingPersonal couldn't source copies after multiple follow-ups. Papers Past found two copies but they were the Scottish edition. I paid 0.589 BTC for jonny1000's copy on January 30th - roughly $470 at the time - with shipping to Tel Aviv included. He e-mailed me a photo of his driving license next to the newspaper with my name written on a note before I sent the transaction. It arrived via Royal Mail a week later.
Charlie Shrem posted a photo of his copy on Reddit and wrote that he'd spent a good amount of time trying to find one, eventually coming across it by accident after having "dozens of companies refund me". A commenter on the same thread noted that a copy had sold at auction for 11 BTC at a Bitcoin conference in Buenos Aires in December 2013 - Shrem confirmed he'd been there and was furious he didn't get it. By 2017, forum members were still noting that January 3rd was "pretty much the only day not available" across every newspaper archive service they tried.
I worked with Ayal Yona Segev at the Bitcoin Embassy in Tel Aviv on the design and production of five hand-made framed editions, now documented at blockze.ro. Each copy is housed in a metal-coated wooden frame. The glass is printed with the genesis block data directly on it:
The Genesis Ƀlock
"The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks"
0x000000000019d6689c085ae165831e934ff763ae46a2a6c172b3f1b60a8ce26f
Satoshi Nakamoto
blockze.ro
Today Bitcoin turns ten. Satoshi built a system with no physical form, no single point of origin. Except there is one: a Saturday edition of a London newspaper, January 3rd, 2009. Five copies, on five walls, owned by five people who got it early.
[Update: March 2021]
The five frames still hang where they were placed in 2014. But the originals are no longer inside them. Newsprint is acidic by nature - left on a wall, exposed to light, it yellows and becomes brittle. As the historical weight of these copies became clearer, leaving them on display felt increasingly irresponsible.
Over the past year I worked with each of the owners to remove the original newspapers from their frames and move them into museum-grade archival storage - acid-free, buffered, light-tight boxes designed to stop the degradation. The frames now hold high-fidelity replicas printed on actual newsprint. To the eye, nothing has changed. The genesis block hash is still on the glass. The headline is still visible. But the real artifact is somewhere safer than a wall.
An interesting anecdote: that same front page also carried the line: 'Start collecting tokens today'. Some of us took that more literally than others.
