Every cut in the schedule has a scratch on it. A small piece of text the miner writes into the coinbase field, the one place in a Bitcoin block where the winner gets to leave a signature. Most of those scratches are forgettable. A few are not. The first one was a sentence about a newspaper, and it set a precedent that the network has been answering ever since. Some of the answers were profound. Some were love notes. One was almost embarrassingly ordinary. Read the inscriptions in order and you get a quiet little history of who was paying attention, and when they stopped.
I. The First Cut Was Already a Quote
The Genesis block has a sentence in it. You know the one. The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks. Satoshi wrote a newspaper headline into the coinbase of the first block and stamped a date on the project before the project had a name in any newspaper at all. We have written about the headline inside the Genesis block before. It is the founding move.
The thing nobody points out is that the headline lives in the same field that miners still use today. The coinbase scriptSig. Free space. A little vellum at the top of every block where the winner can write whatever they want, up to a hundred bytes or so. Satoshi used his to make a point about fiat. Most miners since have used theirs to say hello.
II. Block 210,000: Silence
The first halving fired at block 210,000 on November 28, 2012, around 15:24 UTC. The block was found on what is now known as Slush Pool, the oldest mining pool that has ever existed, running on a Radeon HD 5800. The reward fell from 50 BTC to 25 BTC.
There was no famous inscription. No paraphrase of Satoshi. No statement against the central banks. Just a block. The pool mined it, the network accepted it, and the subsidy halved without ceremony.
You can read that as a missed opportunity or as a kindness. The schedule did not need a slogan to fire. The schedule fired because the schedule fires. Twenty-one million was already the number. The first cut was the proof of concept for the cut itself, and the proof did not need a caption.
The Bitcoin Halving will outlive every caption anyone ever puts on it. That is part of why we believe in it.
III. Block 420,000: A Love Note in the Cut
July 9, 2016, 16:46:13 UTC. F2Pool found block 420,000. The second halving. The reward fell from 25 BTC to 12.5 BTC. And in the coinbase field, the miner had written:
h七彩神仙鱼 · Chandler Guo loves YangYang Jin. Mined by zzhhzz
Translated, the Chinese phrase refers to a “discus fish”, a colorful aquarium pet. The rest is a public proposal of devotion from one early Chinese Bitcoiner to another, signed by the pool operator. The most consequential mining cut in monetary history to that date, and the inscription on it is a man telling his beloved he loves her, with a fish emoji for company.
You can roll your eyes. You can also notice that it is one of the most human things ever stored in the ledger that will outlive most of the libraries we currently trust. Block 420,000 will be replayable as long as Bitcoin runs. So will Chandler’s note. Centuries from now, somebody auditing the chain for whatever audit the future runs will read it and squint.
We tend to assume the cuts are about the money. They are also about whoever happened to win the lottery on cut day, and what that person decided to put in the margin.
IV. Just Before Block 630,000: F2Pool Returns to the Founding Move
May 11, 2020. Antpool mined block 630,000 itself, the third halving block. But the block right before it, block 629,999, was found by F2Pool. And F2Pool, fully aware of what they were sitting on top of, wrote into their coinbase scriptSig:
NYTimes 09/Apr/2020 With $2.3T Injection, Fed’s Plan Far Exceeds 2008 Rescue
The wording is not an accident. It is a deliberate echo of the Genesis line. New newspaper, new bailout, new headline, same point. Eleven years and four months after Satoshi wrote the first inscription, an industrial Chinese mining pool answered him from inside the chain. You can read F2Pool’s coinbase message in CoinDesk’s writeup from the week of the cut.
What is theological about this is the way it landed. F2Pool did not have to do it. They could have written their pool name and moved on. They chose to spend the most-watched coinbase field of the cycle saying, in effect, the reason this project exists is still the reason this project exists. Money was being printed at a rate that justified the founding sentence. So they printed the founding sentence again. Inside the cut that halved the subsidy.
This is the move that has always felt the most pastoral to me. A miner reading from the same passage two centuries apart.
V. Block 840,000: The Quieter Cut
April 20, 2024, 00:09:27 UTC. The fourth halving. The subsidy fell from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC. ViaBTC found block 840,000. The coinbase string they left in it reads:
@/ViaBTC · /Mined by buzz120/
That is the whole inscription. A pool tag. A worker handle. No newspaper. No Latin. No proposal. The most-watched coinbase of 2024 said buzz120.
Now, the same block also carried the epic sat at block 840,000, which under the Ordinals numbering became the rarest single satoshi minted in years, and the block sat on top of a record fee tip of more than 37 BTC, and ViaBTC ended up auctioning the epic sat for several million dollars. Plenty was happening. Just not in the inscription.
Read the four cuts together and the trend is clear. Genesis was a sentence. The first halving was silence. The second halving was a love note. The third halving was a public quotation of the founding sentence. The fourth halving was a pool name and a worker handle.
Pools have industrialized. The poetry has thinned. The schedule has not. Every cut still fires. The subsidy still halves. The chain still moves. The miners just stopped writing into the margin.
If anything, this is the cleanest argument for the founding doctrine the site keeps coming back to. Inscriptions fade. Slogans age. Pools get bought and sold. You can lose every coinbase message ever written and the Bitcoin Halving will still keep cutting, every 210,000 blocks, until the Halfture, the last one, in roughly 114 years. The schedule is the message. Everything written into it is footnote. You have to hold Bitcoin to be saved, and the proof that this is doctrine and not slogan is that the chain keeps preaching it whether anyone with a coinbase field bothers to write it down.
VI. The Counter-Sermon
There is a real version of who cares. A coinbase string is 80 to 100 bytes of free text in one block out of a billion. It does not change the ledger’s economics. ViaBTC could have written Hamlet in there and not one satoshi would have moved differently. The cut fires either way. The pool gets the reward either way. Slogans about meaning in a few bytes of scriptSig are a writer’s hobby, not a network property.
That is fair. The cut does not care what you write in it. The cut just cuts.
But the field exists. And what people choose to do with the small spaces they cannot delete tends to tell you what they think they are part of. Satoshi thought he was part of a fight with central banks. F2Pool in 2016 thought they were part of someone’s love life. F2Pool in 2020 thought they were part of a continuation. ViaBTC in 2024 thought they were part of a job. None of those readings are wrong. They are just different answers to the same question the network keeps asking. What is this block for. The cut does not need the answer. We do.
VII. Read the Inscriptions
Block heights are cheap to look up. You can pull up 0, 210000, 420000, 629999, 630000, 840000 on any explorer in under a minute and read what is in their coinbase fields with your own eyes. You will not learn anything that moves the price. You will learn what the people who happened to be holding the pen at each cut thought was worth preserving. That is a different thing than analysis. It is closer to liturgy.
Look them up. See what is there.
FAQ
What is the coinbase message in a Bitcoin block?
The coinbase transaction is the first transaction in every block, the one that pays the miner the block subsidy. It has an input field, the coinbase scriptSig, that allows the miner to include arbitrary data, traditionally up to about 100 bytes. Miners use it for pool tags, worker handles, advertising, and occasionally for messages.
Who mined block 840,000, the fourth Bitcoin Halving block?
ViaBTC mined block 840,000 on April 20, 2024, at 00:09:27 UTC. The coinbase carried the string “@/ViaBTC · /Mined by buzz120/”. The same block contained the fourth-ever epic sat under the Ordinals numbering scheme.
Why is F2Pool’s message in block 629,999 famous?
F2Pool wrote “NYTimes 09/Apr/2020 With $2.3T Injection, Fed’s Plan Far Exceeds 2008 Rescue” into the coinbase of block 629,999, the block immediately preceding the third halving. The wording is a deliberate echo of Satoshi’s Genesis block message, framing the cut as a response to the same monetary policies that motivated Bitcoin’s creation in 2009.
Are these messages part of the Bitcoin protocol?
No. The coinbase scriptSig has a size limit and a few format rules, but its contents do not affect consensus. Miners can write whatever they want in it, and the network will accept it as long as the rest of the block is valid. The messages are durable because the chain is durable, not because the protocol enforces them.
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