12 Years Later, Bitcoin Remembers the Man Who Got There First

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.