Sixteen years since the first bitcoin transaction

Sixteen years ago, on January 12, 2009, the creator of the first cryptocurrency, using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, sent developer Hal Finney the network’s first transaction.

HISTORY: 16 years ago today, Satoshi Nakamoto sent the 1st #Bitcoin transaction ever made ✨

And the world was forever changed ? pic.twitter.com/wkaCoAUKh0

— The Bitcoin Historian (@pete_rizzo_) January 11, 2025

Finney was among the first to predict the future price of the digital gold. Taking global household wealth at $100–300 trillion as a guide, he forecast that 1 BTC would ultimately be worth about $10 million.

“I think I was the first person, besides Satoshi, to run the [node] of Bitcoin. […] I became the recipient of the first transaction, when Satoshi sent me ten coins as a test,” — wrote the programmer on the Bitcointalk forum at the time.

In the first transaction, Satoshi sent ten coins as a test. Over the next few days, Finney exchanged emails with bitcoin’s creator, helping to fix bugs.

Hal Finney played a pivotal role in the history of the digital gold, and, by one account, was its creator. Yet, by his own account, Satoshi’s identity was a mystery to him. He assumed he was dealing with “a young man of Japanese origin, very smart and sincere”.

“After a few days, bitcoin was running fairly stably, so I stayed on the network. Those were the days when difficulty was 1, and you could mine on a CPU. Over the next days I mined several blocks, but I turned off the computer because it was heating up and the fan noise annoyed me,” — Finney recalled.

Finney returned to the first cryptocurrency in 2010, when Laszlo Hanyecz bought two pizzas for 10,000 BTC. 

On October 9, 2024, the film was released, Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery, directed by Cullen Hoback, which posits a presumed identity for Satoshi. According to the authors, the true creator of bitcoin is Canadian programmer Peter Todd. However, the developer has repeatedly denied the claim.