The chatter is a buzz in the bitcion community, the 210,000th bitcoin block has been mined, there are now 10,499,925 bitcoins and the reward miners receive from solving a block has dropped from 50 to 25 bitcoins. At precisely 2012-11-28 15:24:55 UTC a miner called Laughingbear submitted the successful hash to Slush's mining pool.

This is a pivotal step for bitcoin but lets forget about economics or technical stuff for the moment, lets look at the actual block itself. For those that want to collect a bit of history you can download the block data here. For those of you who cannot read JSON here a few facts about the block;-

The Hash was 000000000000048b95347e83192f69cf0366076336c639f9b7228e9ba171342e.

The Merkle root was 3cdd40a60823b1c7356d0987078e9426724c5b3ab439c2d80ad2bdd620e603d8.

The Nonce was 4069828196.

The Difficulty was 3,438,908.96.

There are 10,500,025 bitcoins in circulation ($127,784,087.25 USD).

There are 1,050,002,500,000,000 satoshis (individual bitcoin units).

The block was solved in 23 minutes and 2 seconds.

A single high-end CPU (Intel Core i7 3930k) would have had a 50% chance to have solved the block in just over 7 years.

There were 457 individual transactions contained in the block.

The Mt.Gox average trade price for 1 BTC was $12.17 USD at the time.

There were 25,421.70093021 BTC worth of transactions in the block ($313,000 USD).

The Reward was 25 BTC ($300 USD).

The transaction fees, also collected by the mining pool were 13.56295554 BTC ($160 USD).

The 25 BTC were deposited into the address 1NEU779yvLaFk39k4Q3QdLjwpWTdWCbzqL.

Laughingbear, the miner who generated the new block later appeared on BitcoinTalk and posted;-

I am very new to mining, and have been at it less than a week. This was the first block I have ever found. I decided to become involved in Bitcoins, because I feel that it could be the answer to all the evils of government controlled currency. This isn't a "get rich quick scheme" for me. I believe that what we are doing can change the world. I am incredibly honored to be a part of Crypto-Currency history. Thanks to Slush's pool for letting me join, if any new miners are out there looking for a great pool https://mining.bitcoin.cz/ In case this post somehow goes down in history, I just want to say.... [censored] The Federal Reserve System. Donations gladly accepted at :

17wnLRDGD9xSzxBTte8poWJzqXqkzr7Q9G Laughingbear

I am unsure that "[censored] The Federal Reserve System" will go down in history like other famous quotes such as "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind" but you never know.

Note: BTC and USD are abbreviations for Bitcoin and United States Dollar respectively. The USD figures are approximate as at the time of generation.

Authors Note: I have no strong feelings about The Federal Reserve System either way.