Written by Marlowe Finch, archival bloodhound at Bitcoin Institute.
Bitcoin has been decentralized and trustless since block zero. No CEO, no committee, no kill switch, no single person who can rewrite the rules. That's the pitch. It's why the whitepaper still gets quoted like scripture.
Block 74638 does not agree with the pitch.
What actually shipped in that block
On August 15, 2010, a transaction landed in the Bitcoin blockchain with two outputs. Each one paid out 92,233,720,368.54277039 BTC. Combined: over 184 billion BTC — roughly nine thousand times the 21 million BTC that will ever exist, created in a single transaction.
