There should be an interesting history/read about that? Satoshi himself designed it like this?

I'm wondering why there is a problem quering the genesis block one and only transaction.

bitcoind getblockhash 0
000000000019d6689c085ae165831e934ff763ae46a2a6c172b3f1b60a8ce26f

bitcoind getblock 000000000019d6689c085ae165831e934ff763ae46a2a6c172b3f1b60a8ce26f
{
    "hash" : "000000000019d6689c085ae165831e934ff763ae46a2a6c172b3f1b60a8ce26f",
    "confirmations" : 288387,
    "size" : 285,
    "height" : 0,
    "version" : 1,
    "merkleroot" : "4a5e1e4baab89f3a32518a88c31bc87f618f76673e2cc77ab2127b7afdeda33b",
    "tx" : [
        "4a5e1e4baab89f3a32518a88c31bc87f618f76673e2cc77ab2127b7afdeda33b"
    ],
    "time" : 1231006505,
    "nonce" : 2083236893,
    "bits" : "1d00ffff",
    "difficulty" : 1.00000000,
    "nextblockhash" : "00000000839a8e6886ab5951d76f411475428afc90947ee320161bbf18eb6048"
}

bitcoind getrawtransaction 4a5e1e4baab89f3a32518a88c31bc87f618f76673e2cc77ab2127b7afdeda33b 1
error: {"code":-5,"message":"No information available about transaction"}

bitcoind version is 0.8.6

Thanks!

Thanks everyone. Learning a lot from this thread.

Just for the reference - finally downloaded the whole blockchain tonight.

So, for Feb. 26, 2014 we have:

# of blocks: 287930
19.267088 GB in .blocks folder.

Soon approaching 20Gb.