Genesis Block Easter Egg

The White House put out a position paper Strengthening American Leadership in Digital Financial Technology a few days ago. The last page of the paper contains a hex dump.

Kinda surprising to see something like that coming out of the White House, but it makes sense in the context of cryptocurrency. Presumably Donald Trump has no idea what a hex dump is, but someone around him does.

My first thought was that something was wrong because the hex codes don't correspond to the text on the side as it would if you were opening a text file in a hex editor. But it's not a mistake; it's an Easter Egg.

Extracting text from image

I tried to convert the image to text using tesseract but it fell down. I've had good experience with tesseract in the past, but this time was disappointing.

I was skeptical that an LLM would do a better job, because the LLMs use tesseract internally. Or at least at one time OpenAI did. Grok 4 initially did a poor job, but it worked after I gave it more help using the following prompt.

Convert the attached image to text. It is a hex dump: all characters are hexadecimal symbols: digits and the capital letters A, B, C, D, E, or F.

Here's the result.

01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 0000 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 0000 00 00 00 3B A3 ED FD 7A 7B 12 B2 7A C7 2C 3E67 76 8F 61 7F C8 1B C3 88 8A 51 32 3A 9F B8 AA4B 1E 5E 4A 29 AB 5F 49 FF FF 00 1D 1D AC 2B 7C01 01 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 0000 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 0001 04 45 54 68 65 20 54 69 6D 65 73 20 30 33 2F4A 61 6E 2F 32 30 30 39 20 43 68 61 6E 63 65 6C6C 6F 72 20 6F 6E 20 62 72 69 6E 6B 20 6F 66 2073 65 63 6F 6E 64 20 62 61 69 6C 6F 75 74 20 666F 72 20 62 61 6E 6B 73 FF FF FF FF 01 00 F2 052A 01 00 00 00 43 41 04 67 8A FD B0 FE 55 48 2719 67 F1 A6 71 30 B7 10 5C D6 A8 28 E0 39 09 A679 62 E0 EA 1F 61 DE B6 49 F6 BC 3F 4C EF 38 C4F3 55 04 E5 1E C1 12 DE 5C 38 4D F7 BA 0B 8D 578A 4C 70 2B 6B F1 1D 5F AC 00 00 00 00

The Genesis Block

The hex content is the header of the Bitcoin Genesis Block," the first block in the Bitcoin blockchain. You can find full breakdown of the bytes here.

The defining characteristic of a blockchain is that it is a chain of blocks. The blocks are connected by each block containing the cryptographic hash of the previous block's header. For Bitcoin, the hash starts in the 5th byte and runs for the next 32 bytes. You see a lot of zeros at the top of the hex dump above because the Genesis Block had no predecessor on the chain.

Easter Egg Within an Easter Egg

Quoting the hex dump of the Genesis Block in the whitepaper was an Easter Egg for Bitcoin enthusiast. The Genesis Block contains a sort of Easter Egg of its own.

The section of the header

 54 69 6D ... 6E 6B 73

is the ASCII text

The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks

Satoshi Nakamoto quoted the headline from The Times from January 3, 2009 to prove that the genesis block was created on or after that date. The headline seems to also be a sort of Easter Egg, an implicit commentary on the instability of fractional-reserve banking.

Related posts

• Looking at the bytes in a Unicode file
• Ethereum address error detection
• Blockchain and Cryptocurrency posts

The post Genesis Block Easter Egg first appeared on John D. Cook.