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This is the first block, how can I see the message?

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

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Click on the sole transaction in that block (4a5e1e4b...) and click Show scripts & coinbase.

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  • how did he do that? I thought OP_RETURN was only added later and that before the only way to do it was to encode data as a fake address in a transaction Sep 20, 2016 at 11:55
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    @s.matthew.english: See bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/20721/…. Because this is a generation transaction, it has a single input whose script is ignored. The message takes the place of that script. Sep 20, 2016 at 12:16
  • How can I get it through bitcoin-cli, I've tried bitcoin-cli getrawtransaction 4a5e1e4baab89f3a32518a88c31bc87f618f76673e2cc77ab2127b7afdeda33b true, and return an error telling me that this is the genesis block and transaction whin it can't be retrieved. Mar 27, 2018 at 19:13
  • @buzhidao: Yeah, I suspect that you just can't. This is a special case for backward compatibility: the original release of Bitcoin had a bug where the coinbase transaction of the genesis block was not added to the utxo database, thus making it unspendable. Every version since had to keep that behavior; otherwise, if Satoshi ever tried to spend those coins, it would cause a hard fork of the blockchain, as some clients would accept the transaction and others would reject it. Mar 27, 2018 at 23:01

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