Sixteen years ago, on January 12, 2009, the creator of the world’s first cryptocurrency—known by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto—sent the inaugural transaction on the network to developer Hal Finney.

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 forecast Bitcoin’s future price. Citing a global household wealth estimate of $100–300 trillion, he suggested one bitcoin could eventually be valued at around $10 million.

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

In this initial transaction, Satoshi transferred ten coins as a proof-of-concept. Over the following days, Finney and the Bitcoin creator exchanged emails, collaborating to fix software bugs.

Hal Finney played a critical role in Bitcoin’s history and, according to one theory, may have been its actual creator. However, the developer insisted that Satoshi’s identity was a mystery to him. Finney speculated he was dealing with “a young man of Japanese descent, very intelligent and sincere.”

“After a few days, Bitcoin ran pretty stably, so I stayed online. Those were the days when the difficulty was 1, and you could mine on a CPU. Over the next few days, I mined a few blocks but shut off the computer because it heated up and the fan noise bothered me,” Finney later recalled.

He would return to Bitcoin in 2010, when Laszlo Hanyecz bought two pizzas for 10,000 BTC—widely regarded as the first commercial Bitcoin transaction.

Context

On October 9, 2024, director Cullen Hoback released Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery, a film claiming to reveal the person behind Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi. The movie alleges that Canadian programmer Peter Todd invented Bitcoin, though Todd has repeatedly denied such claims.