Like everyone else, I’ve always known that
Hal Finney was the second user of Bitcoin after Satoshi. But when I actually thought about it, I realized I had never seen any concrete evidence of this. After searching around,
I couldn’t find any complete write-up beyond the private emails between Hal and Satoshi that Hal later made public.
So I gathered every artifact I could find from around the Bitcoin launch:
- Private emails between Hal and Satoshi
- Hal’s node debug.log file from when he first ran Bitcoin
- The BitcoinTalk post where Hal reminisced about his early participation
- Screenshots of Hal’s wallet that he shared publicly
- Private emails between Dustin Trammell and Satoshi
- extraNonce values in the blockchain
As I did this, I realised that no one had taken a close look at these early events.After carefully going through all these materials, I pieced everything together and this is what I discovered:
- Hal Finney actually missed the Bitcoin launch
- Satoshi was running two nodes when Hal joined (one behind Tor)
- The Bitcoin network halted 8 times in the first 170 blocks
But more important than the discoveries themselves is the
vivid picture they paint of what it was really like using Bitcoin in those very first days.
Without Hal Finney and Dustin Trammell, Bitcoin might have failed and been forgotten.Full investigation here:
https://1stbitcoinminer.com/ I go in-depth on the methodologies I used and keep everything properly sourced.
If you want a TL;DR cinematic video summary, here it is:
https://x.com/raw_avocado/status/2069786136998785412If you prefer to watch it on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bZo3wuYCpE
