Just curious ! could a person trace the block chain back to the first BTC ever sold ?
Ofcourse it can be done. Since the data is technically stored forever.
One of the first supporters, adopters, contributors to bitcoin and receiver of the first bitcoin transaction was programmer Hal Finney. Finney downloaded the bitcoin software the day it was released, and received 10 bitcoins from Nakamoto in the world's first bitcoin transaction on 12 January 2009 (bloc 170).
Taken from google.
But then again Mr. Satoshi was the first recipient of the bitcoins through mining. But I do think you will still need the transaction ID for all of this and one of the sender or the recipient should have made it public idk for sure though. I was trying to check the last post of Mr. Satoshi to see if he did write the transaction ID but I found something interesting :
It's not safe to use listtransactions this way.
I know I've been criticized for being reluctant about listtransactions. Let me explain my reluctance.
Transactions are dynamic. Past transactions can become unconfirmed, go away and come back, become invalid and disappear, or be replaced by a different double-spend. Their date can change, their order can change.
Programmers are naturally inclined to want to use listtransactions like this: feed me the new transactions since I last asked, and I'll keep my own tally or static record of them. This will seem to work in all regular use, but if you use the amounts for anything, it is highly exploitable:
1) How do you know if a past transaction becomes invalid and disappears?
2) When there's a block-chain reorg, it would be easy to double-count transactions when they get confirmed again.
3) A transaction can be replaced by a double-spend with a different txid. You would count both spends.
The model where you assume you only need to see new transactions because you've already seen previous transactions is not true. Old transactions can change at any time.
Any time you take an action based on payment amounts received, you always need to go back to bitcoin and ask for a current balance total (or use move or sendfrom), and be ready for the possibility that it can go down.
Now that we have the Accounts feature making it easier to do it the right way, we're better prepared to have listtransactions.
Now this is actually what was written by him back in the day and the problem of double spending was already known but then again the market manipulation by the media which happened few days before which coincided with the fall in the price of bitcoins could have just been a manipulative trick.
Since double spending was already discussed by Mr. Satoshi I wasn't really aware of this though. But then again I hope the price gets stable again.
https://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-price-double-spend-flaw-critical-report-suggests-2021-1 Now this was all a FUD since it didn't really happen but was just publicized wrongly.
Again editing:
So the block number is : 170 and you can track it indeed.
https://www.blockchain.com/btc/block/00000000d1145790a8694403d4063f323d499e655c83426834d4ce2f8dd4a2ee Viola!