Bitcoin community goes gaga over a recent bitcoin hash. Here’s why it’s so special

“00000000000000000021e800c1e8df51b22c1588e5a624bea17e9faa34b2dc4a” is not a normal Bitcoin hash number anymore

June 19th, a bitcoin hash that split the bitcoin community into many parts is still making rounds on the internet. What’s so special about “00000000000000000021e800c1e8df51b22c1588e5a624bea17e9faa34b2dc4a”?

Let us break some ice for you on the same.

If you don’t already know, this aforementioned alpha-numeric string is called a hash, in this case, it is the Bitcoin hash. It’s generated every time when a new transaction is validated and written on the bitcoin distributed ledger, or in other words, bitcoin blockchain. A user, Mark Wilcox, posted this hash on Twitter the very first time, after which the twitter exploded with tweets, retweets & beyond.

Take a look at the tweets that this hash has produced on twitter. Many enthusiasts have cracked their heads for hours and found something peculiar about this hash.

Let us get you some details.

On Jun 19th, at 19:31 UTC, block number 528249 by BTC.top, which is world’s largest mining pool. Everything was normal, it had 6500 inputs, 1047 outputs, size little over 1MB & 125 SegWit transactions. Nothing was surprising, the numbers were similar to the previous block until the hash was seen in the explorer.

In the explorer, 00000000000000000021e800 is seen. This hash contains several elements that make it so special. Let’s see what it is:

• First, 18 zeroes are normal, this could be the result of a design or simply an accident. Even the previous block had these many zeroes and even the next block to this one had these many zeroes. There are 93% chances that the hash number will have 18 zeroes.
• Even the block number has nothing special, it’s just a block number that’s it.
• These number of zeroes are not by design either, as it needs a very high computational power that currently isn’t available right now.
• The number 21 is significant because Bitcoin has a total supply of 21 million. Next four-character 21e8 is important. A well-known internet theory is known as “theory of everything” or “Unified Field Theory”. Furthermore, there’s even a website 21e8.com that shows the fractal pattern depending on elementary particle spin that is a part of the E8 theory.
• After 528,000 blocks that were mined so far in the bitcoin network. 8 blocks were expected to have 21e8 in the hash number, and this is why the “21” is important.

Furthermore, it is estimated that it should take at least 2500 years to create that hash. The system should work at the rate of 1 exahash per second, which is roughly 2.5% of current bitcoin hashrate.

Certain users say that this hash appearing now is possible with help of a quantum computer. A quantum computer is capable of operating several algorithms at a time and work efficiently. Also, some users think that this could be the same computer that Satoshi Nakamoto used to develop Bitcoin blockchain, if not himself behind this. The mathematical matches are too strong to think that this could be someone else.

Maybe they’re all right, maybe they’re all wrong. Is it this hash really worth the time or is there any involvement of AI among this? What do you think?

Originally published at http://bitfolio.org/bitcoin-conspiracy-21e8.

Author: Shubham Davey Idea/Inputs: Gokul N K