Halloween History Lesson

This Week in Bitcoin - Oct. 31, 2022

Happy Halloween

Or maybe, Happy Birthday Bitcoin?!

Halloween holds a special place in the story of bitcoin and, because of that, here’s a special Halloween edition of the email!

Happy Birthday(s)

Bitcoin has two (three?) birthdays:

1. 10/31/2008

   • Whitepaper Released

2. 1/3/2009

   • “Genesis Block”

3. 1/9/2009

   • 1st Mined Block

Halloween

On October 31, 2008, a person by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto emailed a group of cryptographers with an idea for a peer-to-peer decentralized money.

That money was called bitcoin.

The email falls on relatively deaf ears for a few days before Satoshi receives mixed feedback. For what is now the world’s largest cryptocurrency with a network valued at half a trillion dollars, bitcoin’s first utterance in the world was lackluster as best.

Genesis Block

Months after his initial pitch, Satoshi mined the first ever block of bitcoin. The initial block of bitcoin is called “The Genesis Block.”

In bitcoin, a “block” is a set of transactions that are bundled together. After these transaction blo…