As Bitcoin celebrates ten years since the mining of the genesis block on the 3rd of January 2009, crypto exchange BitMex has marked the occasion with an advertisement on the front page of The Times thanking Satoshi Nakomoto for Bitcoin.

Happy 10th Birthday Bitcoin! pic.twitter.com/DpOPjojsOd — BitMEX Research (@BitMEXResearch) January 2, 2019

The choice of The Times was no accident, as the newspaper was referenced in the first ever Bitcoin block. Famously, when the first block was mined, Satoshi Nakamoto embedded this message into its Coinbase:

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

Believed to be a primary impetus for the creation of the revolutionary digital currency, the financial crisis of 2007-9 was thus linked from the outset to the first ever Bitcoin transaction.

Mirroring the first Bitcoin block, the advertisement in today’s paper also contains a Block Hash, and its corresponding transaction contains the following message in its coinbase:

w#\/ ThanksSatoshi /BTC.COM/��mm,���CA4Z_IGQ�~YVM܈H����{�|�|###B#b)#�

What’s also interesting is that because of the way the code was set up by Satoshi, the original recipient address can never spend the first mining reward of 50 bitcoins (nor the nearly 17 bitcoins sent to the address since then).

The Original Newspaper

The original edition of the Times from January 3rd 2009 has now become something of a rare collectible – so much so that there is a whole website devoted to the last reamining copies of the newspaper.

thetimes03jan2009.com contains a record of all known copies of the newspaper – which at the moment stands at only 7 verified editions. Of the copies available for sale, the asking prices range from $50,000 to $1 million.