HAL FINNEY, TWELVE YEARS GONE — HE RECEIVED BITCOIN’S FIRST TRANSACTION, THEN KEPT BUILDING THROUGH ALS UNTIL HE COULDN’T TYPE ANYMORE
He got there first, and he never let go — not when the disease took his hands, not when it took his voice, not until there was nothing left to hold on with.
KEY RECEIPTS
Hal Finney died August 28, 2014, in Phoenix, Arizona, age 58, after a five-year fight with ALS.
January 12, 2009: became the first person ever to receive a bitcoin transaction — 10 BTC sent by Satoshi Nakamoto.
Built Reusable Proofs of Work (RPoW) in 2004, five years before Bitcoin existed — a working precursor to its proof-of-work design.
Second employee hired at PGP Corporation under Phil Zimmermann; worked there until retiring in 2011.
Active on cypherpunk mailing lists since the early 1990s, the community whose ideas fed directly into Bitcoin's design.
Disclosed his ALS diagnosis in October 2009. Wrote in March 2013 that he had become “essentially paralyzed.”
His family carried out cryopreservation arrangements with the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, made years in advance.
The 10 BTC he received would be worth roughly $805,000 at today's price.
Source: Bitcoin.com News (Shiraz Jagati), Aug 28, 2026.
January 12, 2009: became the first person ever to receive a bitcoin transaction — 10 BTC sent by Satoshi Nakamoto.
Built Reusable Proofs of Work (RPoW) in 2004, five years before Bitcoin existed — a working precursor to its proof-of-work design.
Second employee hired at PGP Corporation under Phil Zimmermann; worked there until retiring in 2011.
Active on cypherpunk mailing lists since the early 1990s, the community whose ideas fed directly into Bitcoin's design.
Disclosed his ALS diagnosis in October 2009. Wrote in March 2013 that he had become “essentially paralyzed.”
His family carried out cryopreservation arrangements with the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, made years in advance.
The 10 BTC he received would be worth roughly $805,000 at today's price.
Source: Bitcoin.com News (Shiraz Jagati), Aug 28, 2026.
Twelve years ago today, Hal Finney died in Phoenix, Arizona, five years into a fight with ALS. Before that, on January 12, 2009, he became the first human being ever to receive a bitcoin transaction — ten coins sent by Satoshi Nakamoto, back when the whole network was a handful of people running software almost nobody else had heard of. He wasn’t a bystander who got lucky. He’d spent the 1990s on the cypherpunk mailing lists that fed directly into Bitcoin’s design, then spent over a decade as one of the first employees at PGP, building the encryption tools that protected other people’s privacy years before he ever touched a blockchain.
In 2004, five years before Bitcoin existed, Finney built something called Reusable Proofs of Work — a working prototype that proved out the exact idea Bitcoin would later turn into a global network. He wasn’t guessing what might work. He’d already built a piece of it. When Satoshi’s software finally showed up, Finney recognized what he was looking at faster than almost anyone alive could have, because he’d been circling the same problem for years.
He disclosed his ALS diagnosis in October 2009, less than a year after that first transaction. The disease took his ability to move, then his ability to speak, then eventually his ability to type at all. In March 2013 he wrote that he had become essentially paralyzed. He kept engaging with Bitcoin’s earliest community anyway, for as long as his body let him. That’s not a footnote. That’s the whole story: a man who helped build something he believed in, and then held onto it with everything he had left, right up until there was nothing left to hold on with.
Bitcoin crossed $80,000 last week for the first time since May. The ten coins Satoshi sent Finney in 2009 would be worth roughly $805,000 today. He never got to see it. He never got to see any of it — not the price, not the millions of people now running nodes and holding keys because of work he did before almost anyone was watching. The theories about whether he was Satoshi himself will probably never fully die down, and he denied it every time anyone asked. What isn’t a theory is that he was there first, he built real things, and he never walked away. Twelve years later, that’s still worth remembering.
He got there first, and he never let go.
The cap is still twenty-one million.
The cap is still twenty-one million.
Bitcoin.com News · Shiraz Jagati · Fri Aug 28 2026 · 6:53 PM ET