First Halvening (Bitcoin Block Header)

8 Bit Palette, Squares, 2018

On November 28th 2012 with block number 210000 Bitcoin underwent its first "halvening" with the reward paid for finding each new block in the blockchain dropping from fifty to twenty-five Bitcoins. Halvenings occur approximately every four years and have been both celebrated as a milestone in the development of the network protocol and commiserated as a loss of revenue to the miners that find new blocks. They have become notable dates in the Bitcoin calendar with almost a festival air about them.

Here the binary data of the data header containing the proof-of-work hash and other details for the halvening block is rendered in the visual language of (post)modernist abstraction rather than as the sequence of numbers that it was broadcast to the Internet as.