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In brief
Elon Musk’s cryptic tweet, “In retrospect, it was inevitable,” has now been etched onto the Bitcoin blockchain for all eternity.
The Tesla CEO published the tweet earlier today. The message expressed his stance on the current WallStreetBets/GameStop phenomenon, which has seen the retail investor take on Wall Street—and win, for once. This tweet, not only summed up the events of the past few days but seemingly captured the whole movement toward decentralized finance, and the anger that many people feel.
“u can’t sell houses u don’t own. u can’t sell cars u don’t own. but u can sell stock u don’t own!? this is bs – shorting is a scam legal only for vestigial reasons,” Musk wrote on Twitter earlier, expressing his own frustrations and aligning himself with those protesting around the world by buying these stocks.
But the impact of the “inevitable” tweet was so defining of this growing rebellion, it’s now been immortalized on the Bitcoin blockchain.
As pointed out by Glassnode CTO Rafael Schultze-Kraft, a Bitcoin miner decided to include Musk’s message when mining a recent block.
The miner put the phrase in the “Coinbase” transaction—not to be confused with the exchange of the same name—where a miner sends the Bitcoin mining rewards to one of his own wallets. Here, it’s possible to put a small amount of text.
The message looks like this: “%25 In retrospect, it was inevitable -- Elon Musk Mined by yhc5t3p�”
These words were included in block 668,197, which was mined at 13:44 GMT. But this miner wasn’t the only person to have this idea.
Zakk Lakin, tech lead at Isle of Man-based crypto exchange CoinCorner, also took it upon himself to make sure the message was forever preserved on the blockchain. Lakin submitted a transaction three hours ago, with the same quotation, but it hasn’t yet landed on a block.
“Seeing the tweet from Elon Musk and then the subsequent updating of his bio to Bitcoin seemed like an important moment in the industry to myself and the rest of the team,” Lakin told Decrypt.
“Still waiting for the transaction to get a confirmation at the moment as it was sent with a relatively low fee, once it's received a confirmation it will be included in a block,” Lakin added.
There are several ways to include a message in a Bitcoin block. There are some services you can use that do it for you. Alternatively, you can do what Lakin did and use Bitcoin Core’s command line interface, to build a transaction and include a small amount of data—in this case, Musk’s tweet—embedded in the code of the transaction itself.
Elon Musk changed his Twitter bio to “Bitcoin” when Bitcoin’s price was at approximately $32,000. Within 15 minutes, Bitcoin had surged to $35,000 on the way to today’s high of $38,000.
But not every Bitcoiner benefited from Musk’s apparent endorsement of the cryptocurrency. Data from analytics site Bybt shows that over $420 million was lost by Bitcoin traders who were going short on the cryptocurrency.
In addition, Lakin said this tweet provides clarity about Musk’s stance on Bitcoin. According to Lakin, Elon was “someone who in the past has flirted with the idea of Bitcoin but never shown any kind of commitment. There is no denying now that the richest man in the world has his eyes on Bitcoin.”
Musk’s message joins other historic moments in Bitcoin’s lifetime that are enshrined on the blockchain. ncluding Satoshi’s genesis block, which reads “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.”
Other hidden messages include a tribute to the origin of Bitcoin in the penultimate block before Bitcoin’s halving in 2020, a message from Julian Assange in 2016, and even a Biblical message when block 666,666 rolled around.
“Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good,” the message read. Say that to Wall Street.
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