Provenance

Why block 9

Every claim on this page is checkable against the chain, which is the only reason it is worth making. Nothing here rests on us saying so.

Sats from the first transaction

On 12 January 2009 Satoshi spent block 9's coinbase and sent 10 BTC to Hal Finney — the first Bitcoin transaction there has ever been. Outputs take sats in order, so that payment carries an identifiable, contiguous run of them. ord stamps those sats natively with the nineball charm, so it is not a claim at all.

BLOCK 9 COINBASE · 50 BTC · 5,000,000,000 SATS to Hal, 12 Jan 2009 · 10 BTC · sats 45,000,000,000–45,999,999,999 369 of them — this collection the bars are to scale; the marker is enlarged, because 369 sats in five billion is invisible
These pieces are cut from the front of it.

What actually goes on chain

No image is inscribed anywhere. One parent and one engine go up once; after that every piece is a hundred and twenty-seven bytes naming its sat and pointing at the engine. The picture is computed when somebody looks at it.

PARENT 5,124 B · once parents: ENGINE 32,580 B · inscribed ONCE each child: src=/content/<engine> 127 B127 B · · · 127 B127 B 369 children — each names its sat, and nothing else
A child is a sat number and a pointer, which is why 369 living pieces cost less to inscribe than one JPEG would.
Supply369
Per piece127 B
Engine32 KB
Orderparent → engine → children

The order is not negotiable

A child names the engine by inscription id, and an inscription id does not exist until it is confirmed. Inscribe the children first and they point at nothing, forever — there is no edit. So: parent, then engine, then the 369. Every one of them is verified against the confirmed id before it is broadcast.

The same immutability is why the collection has a station instead of an upgrade path. Nothing already inscribed can be changed; a machine can only be told something new, and only by a sat we hold.

The record, and why it cannot disagree with the picture

Every piece carries its own record — sat, birth block, tier, age in blocks, personality, form, phosphor, object, wear, charms, and whether the chain is in a rare state right now. The machine reads it off the chain and will show you. The same traits are written into the inscription's on-chain metadata, so marketplaces can filter and rank by them.

Those traits are generated by running the engine, not by a second implementation of its rules. Metadata that quietly disagrees with the art is invisible until a collector notices their "feral" piece is smiling — and by then it is inscribed. Every piece is checked against its own live render before it goes anywhere.

What you own, and what you do not

You own the sat and what the sat decides — chassis, face, phosphor, the object on the desk, its song and its part. That half is fixed at the moment the sat is chosen and is identical on every screen, forever.

You do not own what is on the glass right now. The act, the room behind it, the fee colour, the day it is marking: those belong to the block, and the block belongs to everyone. A screenshot is a moment, not the piece.