The White House put out a position paper Strengthening American Leadership in Digital Financial Technology a few days ago. The last page of the paper contains a hex dump.

Kinda surprising to see something like that coming out of the White House, but it makes sense in the context of cryptocurrency. Presumably Donald Trump has no idea what a hex dump is, but someone around him does.

My first thought was that something was wrong because the hex codes don’t correspond to the text on the side as it would if you were opening a text file in a hex editor. But it’s not a mistake; it’s an Easter Egg.

Extracting text from image

I tried to convert the image to text using tesseract but it fell down. I’ve had good experience with tesseract in the past, but this time was disappointing.

I was skeptical that an LLM would do a better job, because the LLMs use tesseract internally. Or at least at one time OpenAI did. Grok 4 initially did a poor job, but it worked after I gave it more help using the following prompt.

Convert the attached image to text. It is a hex dump: all characters are hexadecimal symbols: digits and the capital letters A, B, C, D, E, or F.

Here’s the result.

01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
00 00 00 00 3B A3 ED FD 7A 7B 12 B2 7A C7 2C 3E
67 76 8F 61 7F C8 1B C3 88 8A 51 32 3A 9F B8 AA
4B 1E 5E 4A 29 AB 5F 49 FF FF 00 1D 1D AC 2B 7C
01 01 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
01 04 45 54 68 65 20 54 69 6D 65 73 20 30 33 2F
4A 61 6E 2F 32 30 30 39 20 43 68 61 6E 63 65 6C
6C 6F 72 20 6F 6E 20 62 72 69 6E 6B 20 6F 66 20
73 65 63 6F 6E 64 20 62 61 69 6C 6F 75 74 20 66
6F 72 20 62 61 6E 6B 73 FF FF FF FF 01 00 F2 05
2A 01 00 00 00 43 41 04 67 8A FD B0 FE 55 48 27
19 67 F1 A6 71 30 B7 10 5C D6 A8 28 E0 39 09 A6
79 62 E0 EA 1F 61 DE B6 49 F6 BC 3F 4C EF 38 C4
F3 55 04 E5 1E C1 12 DE 5C 38 4D F7 BA 0B 8D 57
8A 4C 70 2B 6B F1 1D 5F AC 00 00 00 00

The Genesis Block

The hex content is the header of the Bitcoin “Genesis Block,” the first block in the Bitcoin blockchain. You can find full breakdown of the bytes here.

The defining characteristic of a blockchain is that it is a chain of blocks. The blocks are connected by each block containing the cryptographic hash of the previous block’s header. For Bitcoin, the hash starts in the 5th byte and runs for the next 32 bytes. You see a lot of zeros at the top of the hex dump above because the Genesis Block had no predecessor on the chain.

Easter Egg Within an Easter Egg

Quoting the hex dump of the Genesis Block in the whitepaper was an Easter Egg for Bitcoin enthusiast. The Genesis Block contains a sort of Easter Egg of its own.

The section of the header

    54 69 6D ... 6E 6B 73

is the ASCII text

The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks

Satoshi Nakamoto quoted the headline from The Times from January 3, 2009 to prove that the genesis block was created on or after that date. The headline seems to also be a sort of Easter Egg, an implicit commentary on the instability of fractional-reserve banking.

Related posts

The post Genesis Block Easter Egg first appeared on John D. Cook.

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