On January 12, 2009, at 03:30:25 UTC, Satoshi Nakamoto sent 10 BTC to Hal Finney in Block 170 of the Bitcoin blockchain — the first person-to-person Bitcoin transaction in history.
Transaction ID: f4184fc596403b9d638783cf57adfe4c75c605f6356fbc91338530e9831e9e16
Hal Finney had downloaded the Bitcoin software on its release day (January 9, 2009) and began mining around Block 70, making him the first person other than Satoshi to run a Bitcoin node. The day before this transaction, Finney posted his famous tweet: “Running bitcoin.”
The transaction served as both a technical test — verifying that Bitcoin’s peer-to-peer network, transaction validation, and distributed ledger functioned correctly — and a symbolic milestone. Bitcoin had moved from theory to practice: value was transferred from one person to another, without any intermediary, verified by cryptographic proof rather than trust.
At the time, Bitcoin had no market price. The 10 BTC were simply a number on a screen. But the protocol had proven it could do what no previous digital cash system had achieved: transfer value directly between two parties, without a trusted third party.