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Yes!

Since the genesis block is hardcoded in the software, what likely happened is Satoshi generated it in advance, added it to the code, and then did a few more days of final testing prior to release. Block #1 on the other hand was mined after the initial announcement on the cryptography mailing list: http://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2009-January/... (about seven or eight hours after if I got my timezone conversions correct)



>As an amusing thought experiment, imagine that Bitcoin is successful and

>becomes the dominant payment system in use throughout

>the world. Then the

>total value of the currency should be equal to the total value of all

>the wealth in the world. Current estimates of total worldwide household

>wealth that I have found range from $100 trillion to $300 trillion. With

>20 million coins, that gives each coin a value of about $10 million.

>So the possibility of generating coins today with a few cents of compute

>time may be quite a good bet, with a payoff of something like 100 million

>to 1! Even if the odds of Bitcoin succeeding to this degree are slim,

>are they really 100 million to one against? Something to think about...

First ever reply to Satoshi. Finney was a smart guy.


So Wright is Hal Finney? Or, who else mined bitcoins seven or eight hours after it went live?




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