It has been a wild run, but today marks precisely nine years since the cryptocurrency train took off: January 3, 2009 was the day when the Bitcoin BTC blockchain network had its very first block mined – the primordial block #0.

The first-ever transaction was timestamped at 6:15PM (server time) and yielded a mining reward of 50BTC, which is worth approximately $739,312 at the time of writing. It took another six days until the second block (#1) was mined on January 9, 2009.

Since then, the Bitcoin blockchain has mined well over half a million blocks. At the time of writing, #502349 is the last mined block.

Given how much the required electricity consumption for Bitcoin mining has jumped over the years, it is no surprise that – in comparison to #0 – the mining reward for a single block has dropped to 12.5BTC these days.

Still, this is worth a hell of a lot more today than 50BTC were back when it all started.

Back on October 31 last year, the cryptocurrency community similarly celebrated nine years since the ever-mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto released the quintessential crypto piece – a conceptual paper titled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.”

Since the birth of Bitcoin back in 2009, the cryptocurrency market has experienced tremendous growth, boasting more than 1,000 different digital currencies and a total market cap of $695 billion.

Bitcoin continues to be the leading cryptocurrency, with a staggering market share of $250 billion.