Jack Dorsey Nearly Predicted Which Bitcoin Block Would Include All-Time High

Douglas Adams' "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" suggested the meaning of life was 42. So, what's 705,742 all about?

By Jeff Benson

Jack Dorsey, part-time Twitter CEO and full-time Bitcoin maximalist, cryptically tweeted yesterday: "705742."

Was it the salary of his meditation guru? The number of hairs in his ever-expanding beard? Perhaps it was a butt-tweet.

But when Dorsey responded early this morning to his own tweet by commenting "off by 117," it became clearer-ish that the Twitter honcho was probably referring to Bitcoin block numbers. More specifically, Dorsey was predicting which block would include the new all-time high. The actual block, according to Dorsey and half of Crypto Twitter, would be 705,859.

The all-time high price of Bitcoin is now $67,276.79, according to CoinGecko. As of last night, the record from April 14 of this year still stood: $64,804.72.

New blocks are added to Bitcoin about every 10 minutes, meaning Dorsey's apparent prediction missed by 1,170 minutes, or 19.5 hours. (The actual time between blocks ended up being a few hours shorter thanks to a high hashrate.) He thought all this would happen yesterday right after he first tweeted, in other words. 

Hopes for a record price were indeed high yesterday as BTC lurked just beneath the $65,000 mark. The first Bitcoin futures exchange-traded fund, from ProShares, became available yesterday and registered nearly $1 billion in trades from traditional investors hungry for exposure to the asset.

 Of course, when the actual transition to a new high occured depends on the source of truth one uses. CoinGecko, CoinMarketCap, Messari, Nomics, and others all have slightly different figures as they use different data and exchanges.

As Decrypt noted last November as Bitcoin was pushing past previous (much-lower) highs, Messari's record features a caveat: “The ATH quote is not necessarily the absolute highest single trade price. Due to the nature of the historical data we analyze, we are not always able to look at every trade for an asset. For some assets, the ATH quoted may refer to the All-Time-Highest daily average, or a price-sample on the day the All-Time-High [occurred].”

And Dorsey, who has a history of posting provocative yet confounding tweets, wasn't specifying. Besides, as a Bitcoin believer, he should know better: One Bitcoin is always worth one Bitcoin.