The Very First Bitcoin Transaction Celebrates Its Anniversary Today

14 years ago, on January 12, 2009, bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto made his first cryptocurrency transaction, sending 10 BTC to cryptographer Hal Finney.

Finney was one of the first people to predict the future price of digital gold. Based on an estimate of the total wealth of households worldwide at $100-300 trillion, he predicted that the value of 1 BTC would eventually reach ~$10 million.

In an email sent to Nakamoto in 2009, Finney called the ability to generate coins at the time a few cents of computational time a "pretty good deal."

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

Hal Finney played a crucial role in the history of digital gold, and according to one version was the creator of the cryptocurrency.

In December 2022, Finney's Twitter account suddenly became active after eight years of inactivity. His wife, Fran, urged Ilon Musk not to delete the account of her husband, who passed away in 2014 after an illness, as part of the fight against bots.

The community supported her. The #RunningBitcoinChallenge initiative took place Jan. 1-10. Bitcoin investors participated in a charity run, raising $50,000 to fight amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, which Hal Finney was battling.

Finney mined a few blocks on his own personal computer. Since then, cryptocurrency mining has evolved into an industry with specialized high-performance devices and a network hash rate in excess of 260 EH/s.