Exactly 17 years ago, on January 12, 2009, the anonymous creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, conducted the first-ever transaction on the Bitcoin network, sending 10 BTC to developer Hal Finney. A day earlier, Finney had posted the first known message about the leading cryptocurrency on the social network Twitter (now X), writing: "Running bitcoin" (meaning the launch of the software).
This date became a symbolic beginning of the era of digital money, and Hal Finney himself went down in history as a key figure in the dawn of the crypto industry. The 10 BTC transaction to Finney occurred in block number 170, about a week after the launch of the Bitcoin network. At the current moment, these coins would be worth about $900,000.
Who Was Hal Finney
Hal Finney passed away at the age of 58 on August 28, 2014, from complications of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). He was not just the first person to receive bitcoin but also one of the earliest and most active proponents of cryptography and digital privacy long before Bitcoin appeared. His early work on cryptography and privacy is now considered fundamental to the entire blockchain industry and privacy technologies.
A graduate of the California Institute of Technology, he became a significant developer in the field of cryptography for a wide range of users. In the 1990s, Finney was involved in the "cypherpunk" movement and was a co-author of one of the first email encryption systems, PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), aimed at protecting personal correspondence.
Finney was one of the few people with whom Satoshi Nakamoto actively corresponded in the early stages of Bitcoin's development. He was not only the first to download and run the Bitcoin client but also helped fix the initial bugs in the code. His contribution to the establishment of the network is hard to overstate.
Finney's Bitcoin Predictions
A few days before receiving the first transaction, Finney, commenting on the launch of Bitcoin, not only presented the technical foundations of the new payment system but also saw its global economic potential. Over 17 years ago, the cryptographer calculated that if Bitcoin were successful, the value of a single coin could theoretically reach $10 million.
After nearly two decades, such forecasts are not uncommon. For example, the asset management company VanEck published a forecast for the next 25 years with a target of $2.9 million per bitcoin. VanEck's main working hypothesis assumes that Bitcoin will capture 5–10% of global trade and about 5% of the economies of some countries.
The exact amount of Bitcoin that Finney possessed was not disclosed, but in messages on the oldest Bitcoin forum, Bitcointalk, he indicated that he received them through mining, not by any other means. In 2013, he also noted that he had transferred his holdings to an offline wallet, hoping that "they will be worth something to my heirs."
In one of his last public messages on the forum in 2013, Finney suggested treating Bitcoin like precious metals and declaring profits as capital gains. A similar principle has been promoted by many investors since 2020—the height of the COVID pandemic, when the leading cryptocurrency began to be widely called "digital gold."
Finney himself denied rumors that he could be Satoshi Nakamoto, although due to his deep knowledge of cryptography and close interaction with Bitcoin's creator, this theory periodically surfaces in the community. For example, in 2021, Bloomberg analyst Eric Balchunas concluded that the cryptographer could be Satoshi after reading a message on a forum that the programmer had sent back in 1993. In it, Finney described the idea of cryptocurrency trading cards, the principle of which is similar to non-fungible token (NFT) technology.
And at the end of 2024, against the backdrop of the release of the documentary *Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery*, dedicated to the history of Bitcoin's emergence, the crypto community placed Finney as one of the top candidates for the role of Satoshi.
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