I'm not sure if removing geth's genesis block is a long term solution to the problem mentioned in the comments. How would genesis state exist without it?

After thinking about it a bit more, it technically would be possible to remove the genesis block from geth, but i think it would involve touching a lot of code paths. I think it would be easier to add a "genesis" block to the contracts or (more work) have a custom non fork of geth that uses geth as a library to implement exactly only what we need

@tynes ah yeah another option is have getTotalElements() return totalElements+1.

I think for now my sense is we just don't fix this issue & we leave these +1 and -1s even though it's not super clean. It doesn't seem worth it at this point to add custom logic to the contracts just to handle a weird case that isn't even a requirement to handle. Oh another option is instead of removing the genesis block, we just add an empty transaction at the genesis.

@tynes do your Geth changes assert that tx index == block number? In that case I can just add special logic to handle the first block where submit an empty transaction