First Bitcoin transaction marks its 14th anniversary

Fourteen years ago on 12 January 2009, the creator of Bitcoin, who goes by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, conducted the first transaction in the cryptocurrency, sending 10 BTC to Hal Finney.

✨ Hal Finney: $10 million per #Bitcoin

Exactly 14 years ago 💫 pic.twitter.com/eDath1GS2l

— RIZZO (@pete_rizzo_) January 11, 2023

Finney was among the first to forecast the future price of digital gold. Taking as a baseline an estimate of global household wealth at $100-300 trillion, he predicted that the value of 1 BTC would eventually reach around $10 million.

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

In a 2009 letter from Nakamoto, Finney described mining coins at the time as ‘a pretty good bet’, noting it would cost only a few cents of compute time.

The first transaction of the digital gold was confirmed in block #170. The value of the cryptocurrency Finney received was virtually zero.

As of writing, Bitcoin trades around $18,100, and its market capitalisation stands at about $349.3 billion (CoinGecko).

Hal Finney played a pivotal role in the history of digital gold, and in some accounts he is identified as the creator of the cryptocurrency.

In December 2022, Finney’s Twitter account unexpectedly resurfaced after eight years of inactivity. His wife, Fran, urged Elon Musk, in the bot-busting drive, not to delete her husband’s account, who had died in 2014 after an illness.

Her supporters backed it. From January 1 to 10, the #RunningBitcoinChallenge was held. In the charitable drive, Bitcoin investors took part in races, raising $50 000 to fight amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the disease with which Hal Finney battled.

I am humbled and excited by the support and donations we have received even ahead of starting the #RunningBitcoinChallenge. It’s truly heartwarming to see such a large community coming together for this event. Thank you to everyone who is joining us in this important cause. 3/3 https://t.co/BS2m4itvBH

— halfin (@halfin) January 1, 2023

Finney mined several blocks on his own personal computer. Since then cryptocurrency mining has evolved into an industry that uses specialized high-performance devices, and the network hash rate exceeds 260 EH/s (BitInfoCharts).

Earlier in September 2022, a solo miner with hardware rated at 270 TH/s mined block #752 868 in the Bitcoin blockchain.

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