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.