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The last Bitcoin Block with a reward of 12.5 BTC had a message!!
On the day of halving, May 12th, the very last bitcoin block containing the reward of 12.5 BTC before getting slashed, had a message embedded in it’s coinbase transaction, it read - ‘NYTimes 09/Apr/2020 With $2.3T Injection, Fed’s Plan Far Exceeds 2008 Rescue’ which is a news article alluding to Fed’s unlimited Corporate bond buying programs, and lending measures that involved unlimited printing of money to rescue Corporates and economy from collapsing due to severe hits caused by Corona Pandemic lockdown.
More money was injected into the economy recently than what was done earlier in 2008 by Fed when taxpayer’s money was used for bailing out big banks.
This Bitcoin Block 629999 was mined by 
Reference Article - https://beincrypto.com/bitcoins-penultimate-halving-block-encoded-with-hidden-message/
Deju Vu - Bitcoin’s very first mined Block too had a message!!
This was Block 0, the genesis block. Bitcoin’s genesis block had a coinbase transaction with this text message - ‘The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks’, that alluded to a news article that journaled about Fed using taxpayer’s money to bail out banks, buying their bad debts or NPA’s that were ‘toxic assets’, guaranteeing to back the banks up with Government bonds, to encourage banks to lend more without worrying about defaults in repayment of loans. Also borrowing rates were made cheap by slashing repo rates below 2%.
Through that message, it is believed the creator of Bitcoin, was revealing the purpose of Bitcoin, to be an alternate currency that is free from control and manipulation of Governments and banks. An alternate digital, censorship resistant, peer to peer and borderless currency that people can actually own, without relying on third parties. This was so fascinating those days, a mined Bitcoin block that shows up in the blockchain explorer with a message, very cool.
Simple technology needed to mine Bitcoin in initial years
The Genesis block remains a very special block. The miner rewards for mining that block was 50 BTC, but those 50 BTCs remain on the Bitcoin chain as the Genesis block is an unspendable block!!
Bitcoins for the next two years were mined only using CPU power.
The first Bitcoin application, Bitcoin version 0.1 was a Windows GUI application written in C++ language.
10th Birthday of Bitcoin was celebrated with a thankyou message!!
There is Bitcoin Block 554,509 mined on the 10th anniversary of Bitcoin by mining pool BTC.com with a “Thanks Satoshi” message in it.
Hope you enjoyed this piece of Bitcoin history write up, have a nice day!!