# The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks

> A passage of **The βook of βitcoin** — the Bitcoin chain read as a book. This is
> block 0 read as a chapter, and its transaction 1
> (of 1) 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:** I β1 ■1 §1 (Volume I, Book 1, Chapter 1, section 1)
- **Block:** 0 — The Genesis Block
- **Block hash:** `000000000019d6689c085ae165831e934ff763ae46a2a6c172b3f1b60a8ce26f`
- **Transaction id:** `4a5e1e4baab89f3a32518a88c31bc87f618f76673e2cc77ab2127b7afdeda33b`
- **Read live:** https://bookofbitcoin.io/bitcoin-book.html?txid=4a5e1e4baab89f3a32518a88c31bc87f618f76673e2cc77ab2127b7afdeda33b

## Chapter frontispiece — block 0

Block hash, as prose: ⌘²¹³ *Our abstract accident lecture to perfect. Cop betray humor via super. Slam crumble pelican to cube. Ocean update a weird per monster. Its assault may rotate foam. An eager boss ago promote mosquito.* ⓪⁴³

- **version:** v1 — block version 1 (0x00000001) — pre-BIP9 integer form
- **previous block:** ⓪²⁵⁶ (no earlier block — this is the genesis block; all 256 bits zero)
- **merkle root:** ⋔ Abandon abuse tackle to window. Wife may police matter. Size get flight to club. A veteran tank burst blood out tomato. Some humor is illegal. Medal maze to modify. Disorder may melt its cereal. A ear just sing cap.
  - hex: `4a5e1e4baab89f3a32518a88c31bc87f618f76673e2cc77ab2127b7afdeda33b`
- **timestamp:** 2009-01-03 18:15 UTC
- **difficulty target:** β₃₂ < 65535×256²⁶ — the block hash above reads below this target — nBits 1d00ffff — mantissa 65535 (3·5·17·257) shifted up 26 bytes: the target 00000000ffff0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000, which a valid block hash must read below (32 leading zero bits) — difficulty 1 (relative to the genesis block)
- **nonce:** η 19·97·1130351

## § 1 — The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks

Transaction id, as prose: ⌘²⁵⁶ *Abandon abuse tackle to window. Wife may police matter. Size get flight to club. A veteran tank burst blood out tomato. Some humor is illegal. Medal maze to modify. Disorder may melt its cereal. A ear just sing cap.*

- **version:** 1
- **input 1:** coinbase (∅ — no previous output; new coin)
  - script: β₃₂ 65535×256²⁶ η2² ⁶⁹ “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”
  - sequence: ● — final — disables the transaction locktime for this input
- **output 1:** 50.00000000 ₿
  - script: p⁶⁵ Abandon may get an absurd case. The tired window see avocado. Click due calm tobacco. Gun may minor the ordinary gesture to our illegal aid. Its tea is common. Yes follow to agree. Its sir then sign its hat. Version come insect to laugh. Design rent exile per pyramid out leader. Our ban may solve the organ. A because. Height see agent to cigar. A raccoon may set pan via its certain total. A son bring daughter. Warrior argue height to tip for ocean. Actor remove to settle. A program see a war. ∇
- **locktime:** □ — no locktime — final with respect to time

## 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.

A coinbase input spends nothing, so its script is a slot a miner may write anything into. The first one holds the front-page headline of The Times of London for 3 January 2009.

It does two things. It is a date stamp: a block cannot have been made before the newspaper it quotes, so a later reader can check that the chain was not backdated. And it is a statement of position: a bank rescue, quoted at the head of a system designed to operate without one.

— 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.