Hal Finney: The First Man to Receive Bitcoin

On 12 January 2009, nine days after Bitcoin's first block was created, a Californian programmer named Hal Finney received 10 bitcoin from Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous inventor of the system. It was the first time bitcoin had moved from one person to another. The coins were worth nothing at all. Two days earlier Finney had posted a two-word message on Twitter: "Running bitcoin".

Finney was 52, a veteran cryptographer, and one of very few experts who took Satoshi seriously. Most of the people on the cryptography mailing list where Satoshi announced Bitcoin in late 2008 were sceptical. Finney downloaded the software as soon as it was released, believed he was the first person after Satoshi to run it, and spent the following days reporting bugs that Satoshi fixed. Months later he was diagnosed with ALS, the disease that paralysed and killed him. He kept working on Bitcoin almost until the end.

The cypherpunk

Harold Thomas Finney II was born on 4 May 1956 in Coalinga, California, and earned an engineering degree at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1979. His first jobs were in video games, working on titles such as Adventures of Tron, Astrosmash and Space Attack.

He found his real subject in encryption. Finney became one of the main developers of PGP ("Pretty Good Privacy"), the program that lets ordinary people lock their email so only the recipient can read it, and he stayed with the PGP business until he retired in 2011. In the early 1990s he was a regular on the Cypherpunks mailing list, a group of programmers who believed cryptography could protect privacy from governments and banks, and he ran two anonymous remailers, services that strip the sender's name off an email.

The cypherpunks had been trying to build digital cash for years. In 2004 Finney built RPOW, short for "reusable proofs of work". Proof of work is a puzzle a computer must spend real effort solving, so the answer works like a costly stamp that cannot be faked cheaply. RPOW let those stamps be passed from person to person like tokens. It never caught on, but the idea of money backed by computing effort is central to Bitcoin, where "mining" is exactly that: computers compete to solve such puzzles, and the winner adds the next page of transactions to the shared ledger and is paid in new coins.

The first node after Satoshi

When Satoshi released the software in January 2009, Finney ran a node, a computer running the program and keeping its own copy of the ledger, and mined several early blocks on his home computer. In his own account, published on the BitcoinTalk forum in March 2013 under the title "Bitcoin and Me", he said he stopped mining after a few days because the computer ran hot and the fan noise bothered him, and later wished he had kept going. Satoshi's test payment to him sits in block 170 of the Bitcoin blockchain and can still be viewed by anyone.

In the same essay he described Satoshi, from their emails, as smart and sincere. He had already corresponded with Wei Dai and Nick Szabo, two other cypherpunks who had designed digital cash schemes, which is partly why the idea did not seem absurd to him.

ALS

Finney's symptoms began in early 2009. He was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as motor neurone disease or Lou Gehrig's disease, in August 2009, and wrote publicly about it that October. ALS gradually destroys the nerves that control the muscles. By 2013 he was almost completely paralysed. He operated his computer with a commercial eye-tracking system that also gave him a synthesised voice, and said he could still write code, at about one fiftieth of his old speed. He built an interface that let him steer his wheelchair with his eyes, and worked on software to make Bitcoin wallets more secure.

Bitcoin did not make him rich in the way its later price suggests. In 2013 he wrote that his remaining coins were in a safe deposit box for his children; Forbes reported the following year that he had spent most of his bitcoin on medical care. In his last year, according to Wired, an extortionist demanded 1,000 bitcoin from the family and arranged a hoax emergency call, known as swatting, that sent armed police to the Finneys' house.

Hal Finney died on 28 August 2014 in Arizona, aged 58. As he had arranged, his body was cryopreserved by the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, which stores bodies at very low temperature in the hope that future medicine can revive them.

Was he Satoshi?

The question has followed him since his death. He was involved from day one, he had built a working precursor, and in 2014 Forbes reporter Andy Greenberg found that Finney had lived for years in Temple City, California, the same small town as Dorian Nakamoto, a man Newsweek had named as Bitcoin's creator, which he denied. Finney also denied being Satoshi, and Greenberg, who read his emails with Satoshi, came away convinced he was not.

The strongest evidence against the theory came in October 2023. Jameson Lopp, co-founder of the Bitcoin security company Casa, showed that on 18 April 2009 Finney was running a 10-mile race in Santa Barbara while Satoshi was sending emails to the developer Mike Hearn and Bitcoin transactions were being made. Adam Back, chief executive of Blockstream, endorsed the argument in 2025. In 2024 a London court also ruled that Craig Wright, the best-known man to claim the title, was not Satoshi.

Finney's widow, Fran, a physical therapist who was his main carer, has kept his name attached to the cause that mattered most to him at the end. She leads the Running Bitcoin Challenge, held each January around the anniversary of his tweet, in which participants run, walk or roll 21.1 kilometres, his favourite race distance; ALS Network says she has led it in his memory since 2021. The fifth annual edition, in January 2026, raised more than $61,000 for the Hal Finney ALS/MND Research Fund.