Notable blocks

0

The genesis block

The first block. Its coinbase carries a newspaper headline from that day: "Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks".

Genesis block hex, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

170

The first transaction

Satoshi Nakamoto sends 10 BTC to Hal Finney: the first payment from one person to another.

57,043

Pizza Day

Laszlo Hanyecz pays 10,000 BTC for two pizzas: the first known purchase of goods with bitcoin.

Photo: Sanjev Rajaram, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

210,000

The first halving

The reward for a block drops from 50 to 25 BTC.

An early physical bitcoin (Casascius). Photo: Steve Jurvetson, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons (resized)

420,000

The second halving

The reward for a block drops from 25 to 12.5 BTC.

481,824

SegWit activates

Segregated Witness goes live: signatures move to a separate part of the transaction, and blocks can grow past 1 MB.

SegWit logo: Albert dro, Charlie Lee, Bushido (Segwit.co), CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

630,000

The third halving

The reward for a block drops from 12.5 to 6.25 BTC.

709,632

Taproot activates

Schnorr signatures and Taproot go live, with a new kind of address that starts with bc1p.

774,628

One of the largest blocks

3.96 MB, almost all of it a single picture stored in one transaction as an inscription.

840,000

The fourth halving

The reward for a block drops from 6.25 to 3.125 BTC. Runes launch in the same block, and its fees pay the miner twelve times the new coins.