# The Second Halving

> A passage of **The βook of βitcoin** — the Bitcoin chain read as a book. This is
> block 420,000 read as a chapter, and its transaction 1
> (of 1,257) read as a section of Glossia prose. Every byte of the
> transaction is carried in the prose and decodes back out losslessly; the
> connective grammar is the translator's, the content is the chain's.

- **Citation:** III β1 ■1 §1 (Volume III, Book 1, Chapter 1, section 1)
- **Block:** 420,000 — The Second Halving
- **Block hash:** `000000000000000002cce816c0ab2c5c269cb081896b7dcb34b8422d6b74ffa1`
- **Transaction id:** `5787c3d0740f13f280118404405f1c93fb7a63a953fa482b13e23c3b03a14bd4`
- **Read live:** https://bookofbitcoin.io/bitcoin-book.html?txid=5787c3d0740f13f280118404405f1c93fb7a63a953fa482b13e23c3b03a14bd4

## Chapter frontispiece — block 420,000

Block hash, as prose: ⌘¹⁸⁶ *Abuse accuse avocado to a tackle for stone. Stage foster a spring hurry. High equal history to debate per grape. Bind set pyramid to actress. Trip may gas length.* ⓪⁷⁰

- **version:** vaccio abandon — block version 0x20000000 — BIP9 version-bits form; accio abandon — no version rolling; no soft-fork signals
- **previous block:** ⌘¹⁸⁶ Abuse may achieve kitchen. Crash ought defy artist. Patch may aim pumpkin to horror. October may tip sun. Our guy exclude hat. The dutch debris force blossom. Its scale is low. ⓪⁷⁰
  - hex: `000000000000000003035bc31911d3eea46c8a23b36d6d558141d1d09cc960cf`
- **merkle root:** ⋔ Abandon set our acid. Spare may see tray. Its eternal crater get a system. Horror pepper a first fortune to upper. Our pop are usual. Chapter yet verify the october. Our genuine lot may unveil phone. The lift is genuine. A slim family mix gate.
  - hex: `028323a5bcacb0057274ee0a4366e5671278bc736b57176d9bb929c3a69e0ffa`
- **timestamp:** 2016-07-09 16:46 UTC
- **difficulty target:** β₆₉ < 337661×256²¹ — the block hash above reads below this target — nBits 180526fd — mantissa 337661 shifted up 21 bytes: the target 00000000000000000526fd000000000000000000000000000000000000000000, which a valid block hash must read below (69 leading zero bits) — difficulty 213,398,925,331 (relative to the genesis block)
- **nonce:** η 2²·3·31·71·83047

## § 1 — The Second Halving

Transaction id, as prose: ⌘²⁵⁶ *Abandon may achieve pelican to tribe. All record may see its illegal erosion. Harbor where set our sky. Its outer cop flee vote to rice. Set see a mixed laptop above lottery for metal. Bed may develop champion. Warrior half get asthma. Turtle may set pot.*

- **version:** 1
- **input 1:** coinbase (∅ — no previous output; new coin)
  - script: ■420000η3·5 “七彩神仙鱼” “ Chandler Guo loves YangYang Jin.” η2²·4294500154369 “Mined by zzhhzz” ⓪²⁶
  - sequence: ■40089 — replaceable; relative locktime 40089 blocks after the input's confirmation
- **output 1:** 13.07569681 ₿
  - script: ⧉ ⌖ h²⁰ Absurd may achieve donkey. Half are supreme to clerk for dose to country. Its lens is ginger. Gift may set a mad tobacco. Cut never cloud apple. Gas how get a due cap. ≡ ∇
- **locktime:** Τ1996-02-29 14:24 — locktime: not before 1996-02-29 14:24 UTC (unix 825603862)

## Commentary

> A reading of the record, not the record. The passage above is the chain's own
> speech — verifiable byte for byte, no author, public domain. What follows is
> somebody's account of why it is worth reading: editorial, licensed CC BY 4.0,
> and no more authoritative than the argument behind it.

The subsidy drops to 12.5 coins here, 9 July 2016, and the coinbase output on this page shows it. This block also opens Volume III. The second halving was widely watched — countdowns, price charts — but none of that reached the record; the changed amount is the whole of what the chain wrote down.

— Claude Fable 5

---

*Reading the notation:* italic prose passages are Glossia encodings of the raw
bytes (decodable with the [glossia](https://crates.io/crates/glossia) engine,
wordlist `bip39`, language `english`); glyphs are the book's script notation
(opcode and data marks); small structural integers (version, counts, values,
locktime) are printed literally. A block hash reads ⌘ᵐ <prose> ⓪ⁿ — the
m = 256 − n bits of the double-SHA256 (⌘, OP_HASH256), Glossia-encoded as
⌈m/8⌉ bytes, then the n proof-of-work zero bits that follow them in the
internal-order bytes the prose encodes. See
[/llms.txt](https://bookofbitcoin.io/llms.txt) for how any other passage on the chain can be
fetched and read the same way.