Much of my research is based on commands to which Bitcoin Core RPC server responds. Through playing with the RPC server I noticed an odd quirk in it concerning the genesis block.
The genesis block can be requested with ‘getblockhash’ 0, returning the block hash 000000000019d6689c085ae165831e934ff763ae46a2a6c172b3f1b60a8ce26f which in turn can be requested with ‘getblock’ or ‘getblockheader’ which correctly returns the block information, and the former provides the single transaction hash present in the genesis block; 4a5e1e4baab89f3a32518a88c31bc87f618f76673e2cc77ab2127b7afdeda33b.
On any other transaction the command ‘getrawtransaction’ can be used on a transaction hash to expose the raw transaction data but for the genesis block transaction, the server responds to this command with ‘The genesis block coinbase is not considered an ordinary transaction and cannot be retrieved (code -5)’.
The image below shows the query log of the genesis transaction vs that seen in the second block.
