Hal Finney: the first person to receive bitcoin

Hal Finney was the first person to receive a bitcoin transfer. On January 12, 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto sent him ten bitcoin as a test, recorded in block 170 of the blockchain. The US cryptographer from California had spent decades working on encryption and digital cash, and he was one of the few experts who took the Bitcoin concept seriously from the start.

His story is more than an anecdote from the early days. In 2004 Finney built RPOW, a direct forerunner of Bitcoin's mechanism; he helped test the first version of the software; and, by his own account, he kept his coins offline in a bank safe deposit box so that his heirs would get them. Anyone who buys bitcoin today and holds it themselves faces the same questions Finney worked through in public back in 2013: where are the keys, who can get to them in an emergency, and how long do I want to hold?

This profile assesses Finney's role on the basis of primary sources: his posts on the cryptography mailing list, his own retrospective on the Bitcoin forum and the debate over whether he himself was behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. The documented answer to that question is more sober than many videos online claim.

Hal Finney at a glance: cryptographer, runner and first bitcoin recipient