A year ago block 528249 and it's unlikely hash caused the crypto space to go crazy with speculation.

A few people here have to remember around this time last year when a bitcoin block was mined with a very unique and exceedingly unlikely hash.

00000000000000000021e800c1e8df51b22c1588e5a624bea17e9faa34b2dc4a

There was a whole lot of hype in the space when it happened, several threads on different reddit subs, write ups on crypto sites and blogs, many crypto YouTube personalities talking about it, and by far it saw the most hype and theories thrown around on twitter.

 

The block was mined with a hash that started with 18 consecutive 0's. That matches the number of leading 0's in the hash Satoshi used for the genesis block. To make things stranger the 18 zeros were followed by 21e8. People imbued all kinds of meaning into that combination of numbers and letter, which led to all kinds of crazy theories. The number 21 was significant as 21 million is bitcoin's max supply. E8 has special significance in physics as E8 Theory is an alternative grand unification theory of everything, it's kind of an alternative to string theory for a unified field theory. It involves all kinds of really cool geometry and different ways to think about the nature of reality itself.

 

With that basically people went crazy thinking that the hash was created intentionally somehow, which would require so much computational power it would be all but impossible with the technology of today. So theories were thrown around seemingly getting more and more crazy and unlikely as time passed. Ideas like a message from Satoshi signaling his coming return, to the idea someone had cracked functional quantum computing at a high level and was sending a warning, and then even more out there ideas like the bitcoin network being run by or consisting of AI of some sort, possibly from the future, plus other ideas involving time travel.

 

At the time many articles, blogs, or other places where it was discussed had a to the website: www.21e8.com, at the time the site showed an image of fractal pattern based on the elementary particle spin that forms a part of E8 theory. That whole thing was almost exactly a year ago and now that exact site just has nothing else but a small timer counting down in the corner. When I stumbled across it, it refreshed my memory of this event happening and was enough to make me wonder what the hell it might be about. I thought I'd share here and see if anyone had any ideas.