5 Crypto Mysteries Nobody Has Solved: What's Your Theory?

We’re far from the humble beginnings of Bitcoin, and now the crypto world is a trillion-dollar industry, full of tokens, platforms, transactions… and mysteries, too. All these years since 2009 have left us with several unsolved cases related to cryptocurrencies, and we’re not only referring to the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto or the multiple hackers who have attacked various exchanges and protocols.

There’s more. Public chains can reveal where coins move, but they can’t explain every decision, identify every person behind an address, or uncover every hidden message. Let’s discover some of these puzzles, which remain unexplained to date.

Bitcoin's Genesis Block Message

This is where it all began. It turns out that not only is Satoshi Nakamoto's identity a mystery, but often, so were his motivations. We, at least, know that he was a fervent cypherpunk: a privacy activist, distrustful of governments and any other central parties. That’s maybe why we can find a particular embedded message in the genesis block (the first-ever block) of Bitcoin.

The coinbase transaction of this block contains a string of hexadecimal data (alphanumeric) that, when decoded, reads “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.” It was the headline of The Times, a British newspaper. By then, the UK government was preparing to spend more taxpayer money to rescue struggling banks during the 2008 global financial crisis.