An unidentified Bitcoin user has created a puzzle by embedding a 255-byte message in block 963,629, claiming that a wallet’s private-key material was generated using information from Bitcoin’s Genesis Block.
Galaxy Research identified the transaction on Aug. 23, after Foundry USA mined the block at roughly 19:45 UTC on Aug. 22. The transaction was about 500 bytes and paid 250 satoshis in fees, with roughly 0.60 satoshis per virtual byte.
The message claims that the wallet was deliberately created with extremely low entropy and that all the information required to reconstruct it can be found in Bitcoin’s Genesis Block. However, the anonymous creator has not disclosed the exact key-generation process, so the claim cannot yet be independently verified.
The Genesis Block contains several publicly known values that could potentially be used in such a puzzle, including its timestamp, nonce, Merkle root, block hash, public key and the famous newspaper headline referencing a bank bailout. Because these values are publicly available, anyone can reproduce them, but knowing which values were selected and how they were transformed into private-key material is the central challenge.
The message was stored through an OP_RETURN output, making the puzzle permanently recorded on Bitcoin’s blockchain. The unusually large 255-byte payload accounts for more than half of the transaction’s size, but it does not represent a consensus violation.
There is also an important distinction between the puzzle and the original 50 BTC Genesis Block reward. Those coins are generally considered unspendable because the original Bitcoin software did not include the Genesis Block’s coinbase output in the normal spendable transaction-output set.
So far, there is no verified evidence that anyone has solved the puzzle or moved its associated reward. A successful spend from the suspected wallet, or another cryptographic proof demonstrating control of its private key, would provide much stronger evidence that the claimed derivation method works.
For now, the event is best understood as a publicly recorded Bitcoin puzzle using information from Satoshi Nakamoto’s Genesis Block—not evidence that someone has recovered a secret private key belonging to Satoshi.
