While cleaning up after the Scaling Bitcoin workshops in Hong Kong on Monday, Bitcoin Association of Hong Kong co-founder Leonhard Weese had the forethought to save the podium’s logo from the trash.His idea was that we could collect signatures of workshop attendees and staff and create a token of the event to be passed down in the Hong Kong Bitcoin community.Creation of The Genesis Block was the brainchild of Leo Weese (yellow shirt, right)!First, we marked the block with the most recently mined Bitcoin block number before asking local members of the organizing team who working hard to clean up the venue to sign the block.Next, we took the block to the closing reception at Cyberport’s The Podium and took turns carrying it around and asking workshop attendees to sign.Asking conference attendees to sign The Genesis Block was a lot of fun.Who do you spot in these photos?Video of The Genesis Block Photos of The Genesis Block Front & back of The Genesis Blocks.

Whose names do you recognize?Signing of The Genesis Block happened at the Scaling Bitcoin closing reception at The Podium in Hong Kong.Want to learn more about Bitcoin in Hong Kong?Join us or get in touch!I first got into Ethereum because it promises a paradigm shift, not only in the way we build our software, but also in the way we socially organise, and the way we can scale our human civilisations.For the first time we can create real trustless, permissionless and decentralized systems with fair access.We can do this free from authority and gatekeepers.This is made possible with crypto-economics, peer-to-peer technologies and the Ethereum public blockchain.To compromise on these values means failure.When you look at Status at face value, you probably see an Ethereum client, and depending on your mindset, maybe that’s all you see.But behind that lives a visual expression of the values of Ethereum, along with an idea of making Ethereum suitable for mass adoption while maintaining decentralisation.

To put an end to selling ourselves short in convenience vs privacy.To reclaiming our sovereignty and the right on our own data.To take a hard stance on decentralisation and to rebuild systems from first principles with economic incentives in mind.bitcoin kickassTo put you in control of your own life.They live within us.bitcoin kyc amlThese ideas live in you and me, they exist within the Network we form.Within our context, the Blockchain, Networks can be considered a graph of complex socioeconomic interactions over time, encoded as transactions- they are a representation of communication itself, embedded within a socially immutable system.How these interactions take place are governed by rule sets, protocols that shape the communication between entities — and thus generate value in the form of new economic models.More than just a community, Addresses (People & Machines) gather around an idea or purpose, typically being involved they see something within it.These kinds of Networks are all around us, within us, in fact the largest tech stocks are walled networks.kumpulan bitcoin

The names Facebook, Uber, Airbnb come to mind.These networks have owners, and you are their product.Such is the curse of centralisation.And you are left producing value for someone else.What if it didn’t have to be this way?dba bitcoinWhat if we could have these Networks own themselves?With the Status Network, self-ownership is the idea we will explore and execute upon.bitcoin difficulty realtimeWe believe this permissionless participatory role will have a profound impact on the way we organize as humans, towards shared common goal and beliefs.We want this idea to impact as many people as we can, and edge us towards applications, systems and infrastructure that aren’t controlled by a self-interested corporations, but rather the users of these systems.We intend to encode this Network into Ethereum itself, like markings on a tree.bitcoin genesis block

A Genesis block on the Ethereum mainnet.The Status Genesis block will inscribe the pioneers of the Status Network, and in turn give all future Network participants the opportunity to have direct stake in the direction of the Status Network, and help to participate in improving and growing the Network that we’re building together.Earlier I had posed the question, What is Status?Well, Status is more than an application, it’s a user-owned Network.Our Network a medium, a substrate, in which these ideas will execute on and manifest in our reality, and currently it lives solely, in humans.The value that lies within this Network isn’t money, but in thought and actions of the wonderful people of the Ethereum community, those who have shaped not only Status but who I am as well.They are the ones who truly believe in trustless, permissionless and decentralized systems, and what gives web3 meaning.They’ve done so with lengthy discussions, feedback and critiques, contributing to our development and the development of Ethereum, and even by doing community outreach — all these actions have value.

But quantifying it is hard, so we intend to do this with our own subjectivity, and establish a web-of-trust.We’ll do this by allocating community members Status Genesis Tokens (‘SGT’), an ERC20 token on Ethereum’s Mainnet, which will be redeemable for Status Network Tokens (‘SNT’ — also an ERC20 token) when the Network is fully launched.Yes, there will be, and we’ll be submitting our proposals to the Network this coming week.If you believe in the vision for Status, and that the ways we access the Ethereum network must be decentralized, come join us in building the future together, and be a part of this exciting journey.The genesis block is the first block on the Bitcoin blockchain.Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious entity that created Bitcoin, mined the genesis block on January 3, 2009.It’s been five years since the genesis block’s birth and Satoshi is still unknown, Bitcoin is bigger than ever, and the blockchain is longer than 300,000 blocks and growing.One of the most important features of the blockchain is its immutability.

After the Bitcoin network accepts a block and adds it to the blockchain it can never be altered.This makes Bitcoin blocks rare durable binary artifacts.The cryptographic hash algorithms that underpin the Bitcoin protocol enforce block immutability.If someone decides to tinker with a block, say maliciously flip a single bit, the block’s hash will change and the network will reject it.This is what makes it almost impossible to counterfeit Bitcoins.Bitcoins have been lost and stolen but they have never been successfully counterfeited.This sharply contrasts with funny money like the US dollar that is so routinely and brazenly counterfeited that many suspect the US government turns a blind eye.The exceptional durability of Bitcoin blocks, coupled with the mysterious origins of Bitcoin, makes the genesis block one of the most intriguing and important byte runs in the world.This post was inspired by the now defunct post 285 bytes that changed the world.I would love to give you a link but this post has vanished.

A secondary, but excellent reference is John Ratcliff’s How to Parse the Bitcoin BlockChain.I am adapting John’s nomenclature in what follows.When programmers start exploring Bitcoin they often cut their teeth on parsing the genesis block.If you Google “blockchain parsing” you’ll find examples in dozens of programming languages.The most popular are C, C++, Java, PHP, C#, JavaScript, and the rest of the mainstream suspects.What you will not find, until now, are J examples.So what does J bring to the table that makes yet another genesis block parser worth a look?Let’s take a look at Bitcoin addresses.The following is the Bitcoin address of this blog’s tip jar.Feel free to send as many Satoshis and full Bitcoins as you like to this address.There is nothing deep or mysterious about this funny string of letters; it’s just a plain old number in Bitcoin base 58 clothing.So, what is this number in standard format?Here’s how it’s calculated with J. The second line that defines dfb58, (decimal from base 58), is the complete J program!

You can troll the internet for days looking at base 58 to big integer converters and it’s unlikely you will find a shorter or more elegant conversion program.Not only is the J version short and sweet it’s also fast and versatile.Suppose you wanted to convert ten thousand Bitcoin addresses.The following converts ten thousand copies of tip.At this point fanboys of mainstream programming languages typically pipe up with something like, “changing number encodings is inherently trivial; what about something more demanding like going the other way, say converting Bitcoin public keys to the base 58 address format?” The public key in the genesis block is encoded in what many call the “challenge script.” Here is the genesis block’s challenge script in hex.Public keys take a number of forms in the blockchain.John Ratcliff’s post summarizes the many forms you will run into.The genesis block uses the 65 byte ECDSA form.Converting this form to base 58 requires taking SHA-256 and RIPEMD-160 hashes.