Genesis Block Message Decoder ₿

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January 3, 2009. A single computer mines Block 0 — the Genesis Block. Inside its coinbase transaction, Satoshi Nakamoto encodes 69 bytes of ASCII text: a headline from that morning's Times of London. It is the only human-readable message Satoshi permanently inscribed into Bitcoin's consensus layer — a timestamp proving the block was not mined before that date, and a quiet indictment of the system Bitcoin was built to replace.

The Times
London, Saturday January 3 2009
Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks
Coinbase ScriptSig — 77 bytes Genesis Block (Block 0)
Push opcode
Difficulty target
Extra nonce
Headline (ASCII)
Parsing the ScriptSig 3 push operations
Push 1: Difficulty Target
04 ff ff 00 1d
04 = OP_PUSHBYTES_4. Next 4 bytes encode the compact difficulty target (nBits) from the block header: 0x1d00ffff — the easiest possible target, requiring only that the block hash start with 8 leading zero hex digits.
Push 2: Extra Nonce
01 04
01 = OP_PUSHBYTES_1. The single byte 04 (value: 4) is an extra nonce — additional hash-grinding space beyond the block header's 4-byte nonce field.
Push 3: The Message
45 54 68 65 20 54 69 6d 65 73 20 30 33 2f ... 6b 73
45 = OP_PUSHBYTES_69. The next 69 bytes encode Satoshi's message in ASCII — one byte per character, no null terminator, no encoding header. Pure text.
Hex to ASCII — Byte by Byte 69 bytes = 69 characters

Each byte maps to one ASCII character. 0x20 = space. Click Reveal to decode the message one byte at a time.

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