11 years, 4 months, and 8 days after Satoshi mined the genesis block of Bitcoin, we just crossed into new era demarcated by the mining of the preeminent halving block #630,000.

While much can be (and has been) said about what it means, what it stands for, and why it’s a seminal event for Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, I’d rather focus on what the block said.

Before we talk about the halving block message, let’s first cover some blockchain basics.

For those unaware, when a block is mined the miner who completed it has the option to add a message when using the coinbase to send themselves the mined coins. This allows up to 100 bytes of embeddable data and is available to miners only. Most pools just add their pool name, and that’s how we can track mining statistics by pool, but there’s nothing stopping a miner from leaving it blank or from writing some other kind of message.

Just so everyone is on the same page, every cryptocurrency is backed up by a public ledger (i.e., the blockchain), which contains an exhaustive history of every coin that exists and every time that coin has changed hands between users. The ledger is populated by a list of wallet addresses (crypto coins are stored in users’ wallets), which are encoded by a randomly generated string of letters and numbers.

Accordingly, users can permanently encode any string of letters into the blockchain by presenting it as a (fake) wallet address. For example, a user can enter a transfer of .000001 BTC to the address “15gHNr4TCKmhHDEG31L2XFNvpnEcnPSQvd.” That “transfer” never goes through because the wallet address is not valid (wallet addresses are randomly generated when a user acquires a wallet, so the odds of this string correlating to a real user’s wallet are infinitesimally low), but the ledger encodes this address as a hex code (334E656C736F6E2D4D616E64656C612E6A70673F).

In this example, the hex code is translated to Unicode, and reads as “3Nelson-Mandela.jpg”. 

Now you have successfully encoded a picture of Nelson Mandela into every bitcoin user’s ledger for the entire future of Bitcoin.

Starting to see why this is uniquely compelling?

If you want, you can check out a collection of such messages permanently stored on the Bitcoin blockchain here: http://www.righto.com/2014/02/ascii-bernanke-wikileaks-photographs.html

Now, it’s true that most of these messages are meaningless and will never be seen by the majority of people, even those who are using Bitcoin.

But, the immutable and completely decentralized nature of blockchain lets it act as a history book without any possible censorship.

Nowhere is that better demonstrated than the coinbase data of the genesis block,

Of course, that was the headline of the newspaper The Times for that morning, which Satoshi famously used in the very first block mined of Bitcoin as way to demonstrate for all time what Bitcoin was made to counter: the egregious greed that has caused the 2008 financial crisis, and the irresponsible governments / central banks who let it happen.

How fitting, then, that we should see a similar message at the Halving, ( https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/block/629999 ) forever embedded into the Bitcoin blockchain, that echoes the message of the genesis block 

Here’s an excerpt from that NYT article:

“The Federal Reserve said it could pump $2.3 trillion into the economy through new and expanded programs it announced on Thursday, ramping up its efforts to help companies and state and local governments suffering financial damage from the coronavirus.

The central bank rolled out its relief package just as the government announced that 6.6 million more Americans were newly jobless, laying bare the severe damage to the economy as quarantines keep workers at home and grind entire sectors to a standstill. About 16 million people have filed for unemployment in the past three weeks.

The Fed announced that it would use Treasury Department funds recently authorized by Congress to buy municipal bonds and expand corporate bond-buying programs to include some riskier debt. The Fed also rolled out a highly anticipated lending program that targets midsize companies, including those not eligible under a Small Business Administration loan program.

The measures push the Fed far beyond anything it attempted in the 2008 financial crisis, and expand its already significant efforts to cushion the economy and calm markets, which have included money market interventions and an unlimited bond-buying campaign. The Fed had previously rolled out about $500 billion worth of emergency lending programs, so this could more than quadruple the size of its push.”

If you can’t tell, here’s the difference between the 2009 and 2020 headlines:

The 2009 headline highlights the global central banks response to crisis (ie print fiat money)

The 2020 headline highlights the global central banks response to crisis (ie print fiat money)

The difference is that there is none. The world that Bitcoin was born in hasn’t changed much in 11 years.

While the political landscape has changed since 2009, the defining element of 2020 has been the huge surges in money printing in the US and around the world.

F2Pool, which mined the block, included the message to highlight this money printing—and to show that Bitcoin is an alternative. And while the Fed continues to print more dollars, the new supply of Bitcoin has just slowed right down.

Still, if we long to the next halving, and beyond, I think it’s really significant that this message is in there forever. In 2140 (or whenever it is) when the last halving occurs, people can look back at the previous halvings and read all the messages people have put in them, still perfectly preserved.

Here’s a few more messages that were embedded in the OP_RETURN right around the halving, which you can see in raw form at: https://bitcoinstrings.com/blk02070.txt