Forwarded from 2009 361 Chancellor on brink
"There is a message embedded in the Genesis block, a headline from the Times of 3 January 2009, the day the block was mined: ‘Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.’ I later asked Wright why he’d chosen that particular headline. ‘As you know, I am rather anti-
central/reserve bank,’ he wrote to me. ‘I see them as the true cause of these issues and the bubbles and collapses. But the date was important as a timestamp. It means that I could not have been “pre-mining” and gaming the system. The first iteration of the code was finalised on 9 January 2009. The run was started when I was at the farm in Macquarie later that week. It means that I cannot have been mining for months ahead and had collected a pre-mined set of solved hashes to game the system. I ran more than fifty machines, so the headline was a marker.’"

Pag. 36

The Satoshi afaire.
Andrew O’Hagan
30 June 2016

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n13/andrew-ohagan/the-satoshi-affair