The first-ever block mined on the Bitcoin blockchain network, Genesis, officially turned 15 today. It has been exactly 15 years since Bitcoin’s anonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, mined the Genesis block on Jan. 3, 2009, marking the materialization of Bitcoin as a transferable currency.
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- The blocks on a blockchain serve as data structures where the crypto transactions on the network are permanently recorded.
- Following the creation of the first block, Bitcoin miners have continued to mine new blocks to protect the network from external attacks while receiving rewards in return.
- Since then, around 825,000 blocks have been mined on Bitcoin, taking the total number to nearly 1 million.
- The move made Bitcoin one of the first inventions to use cryptography to separate money from the state, allowing users to effectively bypass banks and traditional financial institutions worldwide to transact with others.
- The network’s token is currently among the top 10 most valuable assets in the world by market cap.