// block 79 · bitcoin · 11 January 2009
Hal Finney tweets “Running bitcoin”
The moment this block marks: Hal Finney's tweet “Running bitcoin”, on the evening of 10 January in California, 11 January 2009, 03:33:52 UTC. The first block mined after it is block 79, 11 January 2009, 03:46:47 UTC.
Hal Finney was a cryptographer, and one of the few readers of the Cryptography mailing list who met Satoshi Nakamoto's announcement with interest rather than scepticism. He had corresponded with Wei Dai and Nick Szabo, whose ideas foreshadowed Bitcoin, and had built a proof-of-work currency of his own, RPOW. When the first release of Bitcoin came out, he downloaded it straight away.
On 11 January 2009 at 03:33:52 UTC, still the evening of 10 January in California, where he lived, he posted two words on Twitter: “Running bitcoin”. It is one of the earliest public traces of the network growing beyond its creator; Hal later wrote that he thought he was the first person besides Satoshi to run the software. In the days that followed he reported bugs by e-mail, and Satoshi fixed them.
The next day Satoshi sent him 10 bitcoins as a test, the first transaction between two people, told on the page of block 170. Four years later, in a post on the Bitcoin forum written after a fatal illness had been diagnosed, Hal recalled those first days: he mined several blocks, then switched the software off because it made his computer run hot and the fan noise bothered him.
Block 79 was mined about thirteen minutes after the tweet, at 03:46 UTC, when the whole network was still a handful of computers. Its hash, like every hash, can be checked on any node.
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