21e800: Bitcoin, Satoshi and the Mystery Twitter Is Obsessing Over

Posted on June 19 by Mark Wilcox, the hashtag actually represents a cryptographic code known as a hash that's produced each time new transactions are validated and written onto the bitcoin blockchain.

Couple the unsolved status of the E8 theory with the equally unsolved mystery of the exact identity of the person(s) who brought bitcoin - with its supply cap of 21 million coins - into existence, and you get the hypothesis that "21e800" isn't just some random string of numbers and value.

The theory seems to suggest, it is a "Vanity hash" purposefully placed by the creator of bitcoin himself/herself/themselves, Satoshi Nakamoto.

So for all these reasons and a few more, several people on Twitter are raving about the sheer impossibility of the existence of this hash, if indeed it was created and purposefully marked by an unknown person(s).

The impossibility of it all has led others to assert that perhaps the true identity of the creator of bitcoin is really something out of this world.

What's clear from the day's social chatter is that the mystery behind this hash value is closely linked to the mystique - and fascination - with Satoshi Nakamoto and the creation story of bitcoin itself.

A post on the Bitcoin Talk forum highlights how today's viral mystery is actually a rather old one.

Begun back in 2013, a post dubbed "A mistery[sic] hidden in the Genesis Block" on bitcointalk.org questions the creation of the first verified transaction using bitcoin.

To put things in perspective, from unlocking Block 0, the genesis block, to Block 1, the approximate time to transpire was 6 days.

According to calculations that have to do with the size of nonces - which are basically the additional data values added by miners to the hash function in order to get the appropriate hash value validating the next block - the approximate time to unlock Block 0 was only 4.2 minutes.