How to find the secret message in Bitcoin’s first transaction?

Satoshi left a secret message in Bitcoin’s first transaction:

The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks

It refers to this article in The Sunday Times. The point is to prove that the chain was created at least by that date. It’s also a tongue-in-cheek joke about the nature of currency and how governments manage it. You don’t have to take my word for it, though. Here is how to find it yourself albeit using the Bitcoin GUI instead of the command-line interface.

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Be sure to set up your Bitcoin node with the full transaction index!

Out of the box, you can only look up a transaction by its index when the transaction is associated with a wallet you own. This optimization makes sense from an efficiency perspective because should you waste disk space on transactions that aren’t your own? That is a good point, but you don’t save much space.

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