January 3rd marks the day when Bitcoin blockchain started working. Some refer to this day as the real birthday of Bitcoin, despite the day when the white paper was first published on 31st of October. January 3rd was the day when the first block was mined, and the first 50 Bitcoins were issued to Satoshi Nakamoto. Eventually, people started calling it “block 0”, although previous adaptors called it Block 1.
The first block rewardIn the first block which was mined in the Bitcoin blockchain, the reward was 50 BTC. It went to address 1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa (
https://www.blockchain.com/btc/tx/4a5e1e4baab89f3a32518a88c31bc87f618f76673e2cc77ab2127b7afdeda33b?show_adv=true).
An interesting fact is that
these coins cannot be spent due to the Bitcoin code. So even if Satoshi once came out and wanted to claim these 50 BTC, he couldn't. It is not entirely sure if this was done on purpose.
A Redditor who goes by the nickname "theymos", explained it very well:
“This is how the Bitcoin client worked when Satoshi created it: The client maintains a block database and a transaction database. When it finds that its block database is empty, it inserts the genesis block into its block database to get things started. This block includes a transaction sending 50 BTC to 1A1z..., but the client does not insert this transaction into its transaction database. So even though this transaction is part of the blockchain, if the client sees a transaction spending this 50 BTC, it won't be able to find the 50 BTC transaction in its transaction database, and the spending transaction will be rejected. In other words, the genesis block's transaction isn't considered to be a "real transaction" by the original Bitcoin client.”
Since then, people supporting the Bitcoin movement and the creation of Bitcoin blockchain has sent small amounts of donations to the address.
To read more interesting facts on the Genesis block, visit our site:
https://bestcoininvestments.com/what-is-bitcoin-genesis-block/Hope you enjoy it, and please share your thoughts on this!