How to Find the Genesis Block and the Pizza Transaction on a Block Explorer

You can see Bitcoin's two most famous moments yourself in about five minutes, for free, with no wallet or account. Open a public block explorer such as mempool.space, search for block 0 to find the genesis block and its hidden Times headline, then paste the pizza transaction ID a1075db5…d48d to see the 10,000 BTC payment in block 57,043.

This is the hands-on companion to our posts on what the Genesis Block message means and the Bitcoin Pizza Day transaction. Those tell the stories. This one shows you where to click.

What you need

• A browser.
• A public block explorer. We use mempool.space; blockstream.info works the same way.
• Optionally, any hex-to-text converter (or one line of Python) for decoding the headline.

Part 1: Find the genesis block

Step 1: Search for block 0

Type 0 into the explorer's search bar and choose the block result. On Blockstream you can also go straight to blockstream.info/block-height/0.

Step 2: Check the genesis block hash

The block's identifier, its hash, is:

000000000019d6689c085ae165831e934ff763ae46a2a6c172b3f1b60a8ce26f

Every full Bitcoin node has this exact value built in. If your explorer shows something else, you're not looking at Bitcoin. The page also shows:

Field	Value
Height	0
Timestamp	3 January 2009, 18:15:05 UTC
Previous block	none (it's the first)
Transactions	1
Size	285 bytes
Nonce	2,083,236,893
Difficulty	1

Step 3: Open the coinbase transaction

The block has one transaction, the coinbase, with ID 4a5e1e4baab89f3a32518a88c31bc87f618f76673e2cc77ab2127b7afdeda33b. Click it. Its input says "coinbase" instead of pointing to an earlier payment, because new coins were being created.

Step 4: Find the hidden headline

Expand the input details and look for the field called ScriptSig (on mempool.space you may need to click "Details"). You'll see this hex:

04ffff001d0104455468652054696d65732030332f4a616e2f32303039204368616e63656c6c6f72206f6e206272696e6b206f66207365636f6e64206261696c6f757420666f722062616e6b73

The first part (04ffff001d 01 04) is technical data. Then 45 (69 in decimal) announces that 69 bytes of data follow, and those bytes are plain text.

Step 5: Decode the hex to text

Copy everything after 45 (starting 5468652054...) into any hex-to-ASCII converter, or run:

print(bytes.fromhex("5468652054696d65732030332f4a616e2f32303039204368616e63656c6c6f72206f6e206272696e6b206f66207365636f6e64206261696c6f757420666f722062616e6b73").decode())

The output:

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

Each pair of hex characters is one letter: 54 is "T", 68 is "h", 65 is "e". Some explorers also show an ASCII view of the scriptsig, so you may spot the sentence without decoding at all. It's the same line printed on the chest of the MOOD Genesis T-shirt.

Step 6: Look at the 50 BTC that can never move

The coinbase has one output of 50 BTC, paid to a public key that explorers display as the address 1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa. The explorer marks it unspent, and it always will be: the genesis block is hard-coded into the software in a way that leaves its reward out of the set of spendable coins, so those 50 BTC can never be spent. If you click the address, you'll see thousands of later transactions. Those are people sending small tributes to Satoshi's first address, and none of it has ever been spent.

Part 2: Find the Pizza transaction

Step 1: Paste the transaction ID

Paste this into the search bar:

a1075db55d416d3ca199f55b6084e2115b9345e16c5cf302fc80e9d5fbf5d48d

It starts a1075db5 and ends d48d, the same hash printed around the sleeve cuffs of the MOOD Pizza T-shirt.

Step 2: Check the confirmation

The transaction page shows:

Field	Value
Block	57,043
Block time	22 May 2010, 18:16:31 UTC
Inputs	131
Outputs	1
Amount sent	10,000 BTC
Fee	0.99 BTC
Size	23,620 bytes

Click the block number to see block 57,043 itself (hash 00000000152340ca42227603908689183edc47355204e7aca59383b0aaac1fd8). It holds just two transactions: the miner's coinbase and the pizza payment.

Step 3: Read the inputs and output

The 131 inputs are many smaller earlier payments from Laszlo Hanyecz's wallet, gathered together to add up to 10,000.99 BTC. The single output sends exactly 10,000 BTC to 17SkEw2md5avVNyYgj6RiXuQKNwkXaxFyQ, the payment to jercos, the forum user who had the two pizzas delivered. The remaining 0.99 BTC went to the miner as the fee.

Step 4: Follow the money (optional)

Click the output and the explorer shows it was spent in the very next block, 57,044. The 10,000 BTC didn't sit still for long.

What you're looking at

A block explorer is a website that reads the public Bitcoin blockchain and shows it in a readable form. It isn't a source of truth itself; it displays data that any node can check independently. That's why comparing two explorers, like mempool.space and blockstream.info, and getting the same hashes is meaningful.

• Block hash: a fingerprint of the block's header. The leading zeros are the visible result of proof-of-work.
• Transaction ID (txid): a fingerprint of one transaction. Change one byte and the ID changes completely.
• Coinbase: the first transaction in every block, where new bitcoin is created. Miners can put arbitrary data in its input, which is how Satoshi embedded the headline.
• Inputs and outputs: inputs are earlier coins being spent; outputs are where they go. Inputs minus outputs equals the fee.

Want the context around these two blocks? Our Bitcoin history timeline 2008–2010 fills in what happened between them, and the Bitcoin anniversaries calendar tells you when to come back and look again: 3 January and 22 May.