Hal Finney receives 10 BTC from Satoshi and becomes the network's first second node

JAN 12 2009 · 12:05

Video: Hal Finney: The First Person to Receive a Bitcoin Transaction Date: 2009-01-12 · Type: bitcoin · Hub: bay-area · Tags: hal-finney, first-transaction, cypherpunk, pgp, rpow, als, alcor, satoshi Running bitcoin. Finney downloaded the Bitcoin client the day after its public release and sent a two-word tweet — "Running bitcoin" — that would become one of the most-cited dispatches in the archive. On January 12 he received 10 BTC from Satoshi in block 170, the network's first non-coinbase transaction. The transfer was partly a test and partly a gesture of recognition: Finney was, alongside Back and Dai and Szabo, one of the small number of people whose prior work the whitepaper had drawn on, and his participation gave the project an immediate genealogy inside the cypherpunk lineage that no later figure could replicate. His provenance was real. He had co-written PGP 2.0 at PGP Corp, had been a regular presence on the cypherpunks mailing list through the 1990s, and in 2004 had built RPOW — Reusable Proofs of Work — a system that came closer to workable digital cash than anything else before Bitcoin. He had seen most of the prior attempts fail and understood specifically how they had failed. His "Bitcoin and me" post on BitcoinTalk in March 2013, written as ALS was advancing, is one of the canonical documents of the period: careful, precise, unnostalgic, genuinely happy about what had been built. Finney was diagnosed with ALS later in 2009 and died on August 28 2014, months after Mt. Gox collapsed and in the same year Ethereum launched. His body was cryopreserved by Alcor. The 10 BTC from block 170 — then worth essentially nothing — was by then worth over $5,000, a figure that would continue to compound in ways he had, characteristically, thought seriously about before dying. Facts • Transaction hash: f4184fc596403b9d638783cf57adfe4c75c605f6356fbc91338530e9831e9e16 • Block 170, mined by Satoshi Nakamoto • Finney's 'Running bitcoin' tweet: January 10 2009 (handle @halfin) • Finney co-authored PGP 2.0 and built RPOW (Reusable Proofs of Work) in 2004 • Diagnosed with ALS in 2009; died August 28 2014 • Body cryopreserved by Alcor Life Extension Foundation, Scottsdale Arizona Primary Documents • Hal Finney: 'Bitcoin and me' (BitcoinTalk, March 19 2013) — https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=155054.0 • Blockchain explorer: block 170 — https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/blocks/btc/170