Block Confirmations

I have a screen shot here of the Bitcoin Genesis block. It has 649,654 confirmations. Does this mean that there were 649,654 Bitcoin nodes in existence at that time? That doesn’t seem possible. When the Bitcoin network was first launched, how were all the various nodes created? Or, how did the Bitcoin protocol end up getting hosted on all the various nodes? Was there some kind of sign-up that occurred? Doesn’t this mean that there was already a vital community even before the Genesis block was created?

The number of confirmations on the genesis block is the same as the block height, it increases with each new block.

The block height is 0.

OK, I see now. Every time a new block is added to the blockchain, each block in the chain has the number of confirmations incremented. So the number of confirmations on the Genesis block is equal to the number of blocks in the entire chain (the height). So when we look at the Genesis block again at a later time, the number of confirmations has increased.

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