Write yourself into a genesis block.
The original
It began with a headline.
The Times03 · Jan · 2009
Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks
Billions may be needed as lending squeeze tightens. The Chancellor will decide within weeks whether to pump billions more into the economy as evidence mounts that the £37 billion part-nationalisation has failed to keep credit flowing.
This exact headline is embedded, byte for byte, in Bitcoin's first block: a timestamp, and perhaps a comment, that will outlive the paper it was printed on.
On 3 January 2009, someone using the name Satoshi Nakamoto mined block 0, the genesis block, and inscribed that day's Times headline into it. Every one of the billion-plus Bitcoin transactions since traces its ancestry to this one block.
The block below is the real thing: its actual hash, nonce, and inscription, exactly as they sit at the root of the chain today.
0
“The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”
000000000019d6689c085ae165831e934ff763ae46a2a6c172b3f1b60a8ce26f
nonce 2,083,236,893 3 Jan 2009, 18:15 UTC struck by: one CPU, somewhere
Plain terms
Three ideas, no jargon.
A genesis block is simpler than it sounds. It's made of three things you already understand, or take the 5-minute interactive lesson and learn it by breaking one.
\[ page one \]
The first page of a ledger
A blockchain is a book of records where each page references the page before it. The genesis block is page one, the only page with nothing before it. Its “previous page” field is just zeros: `000…000`. Every chain, including Bitcoin, has exactly one.
\[ the inscription \]
Words carved in, forever
The miner of a block gets to include a short message. Change a single letter of it, and the block's fingerprint (its hash) changes completely, breaking every page that follows. That's why Satoshi's headline can never be quietly edited. Inscriptions are permanent.
\[ the proof \]
Work you can verify at a glance
Mining means retrying the block with different “nonce” numbers until its hash starts with enough zeros. Finding one takes billions of tries; checking one takes an instant. The zeros at the front of a block hash are the receipt for the work.
Then & now
What took a CPU its evenings takes silicon a blink.
A block at Bitcoin's original difficulty needs about 4.3 billion hash attempts on average. Here's what that costs, by machine:
| Machine | Hash rate | One genesis-difficulty block, on average | | -------------------------------------------------- | ---------- | ------------------------------------------- | | 2009 desktop CPU (what Satoshi used) | \~2–4 MH/s | \~20–35 minutes of steady hashing | | Your browser, this page (JavaScript) | \~0.5 MH/s | \~2½ hours | | One USB stick miner, 2026 (BM1397 ASIC, 672 cores) | \~200 GH/s | 21 milliseconds, about 47 blocks per second |
The demo below uses a friendlier target (a hash starting with four zeros, about 65,000 attempts) so your browser can strike a block in around a second. Same mechanism, smaller mountain. (Curious about block 0 itself? The six-day gap between it and block 1 remains one of Bitcoin's small mysteries.) For the full ladder, from milliseconds to 68,000 years, see the depth ladder.
Your turn
Strike a block with your own words.
Type an inscription. Your browser will hash it with a timestamp and a counting nonce (double SHA-256, the same algorithm as Bitcoin) until the hash starts with the zeros you asked for. Nothing leaves this page.
Strike it
Target000… (\~4,000 tries) 0000… (\~65,000 tries) 00000… (\~1M tries)
The forge is idle. Type an inscription and strike.
The vault
Recently struck on real silicon.
Blocks below were mined not by a browser but by a GekkoScience Compac F, a thumb-sized ASIC with 672 hash cores, at Bitcoin's original genesis difficulty. Full 32-zero-bit proof of work, the same bar Satoshi's block cleared.
⬒
“Compac F Genesis”
000000002bfdd443b79ac22e8abc216d1c055598fb581c42113d8e6c0f69afec
nonce 627,715,779 15 Jul 2026 difficulty: same as Bitcoin block 0
·
Your inscription could be next.
00000000····························································
awaiting the forge
The vault is public and anonymous. Inscriptions appear without any information about who requested them. The six most recent strikes show here; browse the complete archive →
Pricing
Free at the original bar. Pay only to go deeper.
Every real block is struck on the same ASIC and lands in the same public vault with a verifiable certificate. What you choose is the depth: every extra zero is sixteen times the work, and the plate wears its metal forever. See the depth ladderfor the full math.
Genesis · 8 zeros
Free
- Bitcoin's original 2009 difficulty bar
- Struck in seconds, certificate by email
- Up to 10 per signed-in account
- 1 in 16 gets a lucky 9th zero. Luck is not for sale Sign in & strike free
- 256× the work of block 0
- The chip hunts under a minute for you
- Gold plate in the vault, gold certificate Strike gold
- 4,096× the work of block 0
- Several minutes of live suspense
- Platinum plate, platinum certificate Strike platinum
- 65,536× the work of block 0
- The chip labors up to an hour or two, just for you
- The rarest plate the forge can strike
The toy miner above is free too, no account at all.
Gold · 10 zeros
$9.99
Coming soon
Platinum · 11 zeros
$29
Coming soon
Prismatic · 12 zeros
$99
Coming soon
Paid strikes need no account: pay, type your inscription at checkout, and the certificate arrives by email. Blocks are standalone artifacts, not tokens; nothing here is an investment.
The foundry queue
Mine a real one, live.
Sign in, write a one-line inscription, and watch the ASIC strike it into a genesis block in real time. Up to 10 per account, free during beta.
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