Block 100,000 · 29 December 2010
Block one hundred thousand
Block one hundred thousand arrived on 29 December 2010, a few days short of two years after the genesis block. At one block every ten minutes, a hundred thousand blocks take about 694 days: the chain was close to its schedule, and its height had six digits for the first time.
The block itself is small: four transactions in 957 bytes, among them the payment of its fifty bitcoins to the miner. Its difficulty, 14,484, measures how much work the network then asked for; it had grown more than ten thousand times since the start, as miners moved from processors to graphics cards and the first mining pools appeared.
It was a quiet moment for Bitcoin. Earlier that month Satoshi Nakamoto had written his last messages on the forum, and in the months that followed he withdrew from public view, leaving the project to the people already maintaining it. The chain went on regardless, one block after another, which is the point of its design.
Round numbers mean nothing to the protocol, but they mean something to people: this is the block that closed the first hundred thousand.
Sources
- Satoshi Nakamoto, one of his last posts on the Bitcoin Forum, 12 December 2010
- The block data, read from our node and printed on the poster