The Genesis block

September 15th, 2008 marked a defining moment for the finance industry, as Lehman Brothers, at that time the fourth largest investment bank, filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy after massive losses in stock price and assets. The collapse marked the beginning of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008.

Shortly after, Bitcoin, a new type of virtual currency, was launched by an anonymous developer, or group of developers, under the name Satoshi Nakamoto. The software was built on a publicly-accessible transaction ledger, that is distributed and validated by a network of independent nodes. More importantly, its design was powerfully resilient to attacks.

The mysterious developer launched Bitcoin at the beginning of 2009. Encoded in the first block of transactions was a message highly relevant to the state of global financial affairs at that time:

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

The first block of transactions, called the "genesis block", set forth...