blockmemento

// block 170 · bitcoin · 12 January 2009

The first transaction

Nine days after the genesis block, Bitcoin had very few users. Hal Finney, a cryptographer who had answered Satoshi Nakamoto's announcement of the software, was running it on his computer and reporting what he saw; on 11 January 2009 he wrote on Twitter, simply, “Running bitcoin”.

In block 170, mined on 12 January 2009 at 03:30:25 UTC, Satoshi sent him 10 bitcoins. The coins came from the reward of block 9, which Satoshi had mined: the transaction spent those 50 bitcoins, paid 10 to Hal Finney's key and returned the other 40 as change. Every transaction before it in the chain paid a miner and created new coins; this one was the first to move coins that already existed, from one person to another.

Four years later, Hal Finney told the story on the Bitcoin forum: he was the recipient of the first bitcoin transaction, when Satoshi sent him ten coins as a test. What had been a trial between two people became the form of every payment the chain has carried since.

The key figures of this poster count the two transactions of the block: the reward of its miner, and this one. Its hash, like every hash, can be checked on any node.

make this poster see on the chain

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