Key Takeaways
- Cryptographer Hal Finney passed away on August 28, 2014, after a five-year battle with ALS.
- The 10 BTC Satoshi Nakamoto sent him in January 2009 would be worth over $800,000 today.
- Theories tying Finney to Satoshi Nakamoto’s true identity still circulate 12 years after his death.
A Signature Before Bitcoin Had a Price
Before bitcoin had a massive price tag attached to it, it had its first true recipient. On January 12, 2009, Finney became the first person to receive a bitcoin transaction, when Satoshi Nakamoto sent him 10 BTC in what is now recognized as the moment digital cash left the whiteboard and became a working network.
That said, Finney was not some bystander who got lucky but a tech veteran who had already spent decades building the tools Bitcoin would eventually lean on. In the early 1990s, he was an active voice on various cypherpunk mailing lists, the same community of coders and privacy advocates whose ideas fed into Bitcoin’s design.
He later became the second employee hired by Phil Zimmermann at PGP Corporation, the company behind Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption software, and worked there as a key contributor until his retirement in 2011.
Moreover, in 2004, years before Bitcoin existed, Finney built Reusable Proofs of Work (RPoW), an early prototype cryptocurrency built on Hashcash that proved out concepts Bitcoin would later formalize.
A Fight He Didn’t Step Away From
Finney disclosed his amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) diagnosis publicly in October 2009, less than a year after receiving that first bitcoin transaction. The disease is progressive and attacks the nerve cells that control muscle movement.
Finney wrote in March 2013 that he had become “essentially paralyzed,” yet he kept engaging with Bitcoin’s early community through the disease’s advancing stages. When he was declared legally dead on August 28, 2014, in Phoenix, Arizona, at age 58, his family carried out cryopreservation arrangements with the Alcor Life Extension Foundation that had been made years in advance.
The Satoshi Question That Won’t Go Away
Finney’s closeness to Bitcoin’s creation, paired with his cryptography background and a Caltech engineering degree, has fueled years of speculation that he was Satoshi Nakamoto himself, or worked closely with whoever was.
Bitcoin.com News has previously laid out the many facts pointing to Hal Finney being Satoshi, an internal look at the circumstantial case that still gets revisited every time the identity question resurfaces. Finney always denied being Bitcoin’s creator, and no verified evidence has settled the question either way.
What Ten Bitcoin Became
The anniversary lands at a notable moment for the asset Finney helped bring to life. Bitcoin’s price crossed $80,000 for the first time since May on August 25, gaining roughly 28% over eight days and briefly touching an intraday high above $81,000.
At that price range, the 10 BTC Finney received from Satoshi Nakamoto in January 2009 would be worth roughly $805,000 today, a figure that would have sounded absurd to almost anyone in the room when that transaction first went through.
Finney never got to see bitcoin’s price reach even a small fraction of where it trades now. But the tools he built, the questions his life still raises about Bitcoin’s origins, and the fact that his name remains the answer to “who received the first bitcoin” mean his imprint on the network hasn’t faded with time.
Twelve years on, that’s still what people are logging on to remember today.
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