Satoshi-to-Finney transfer remains Bitcoin most famous payment

Blockchain explorers show the transaction confirmed in the early hours of January 12, 2009 (UTC), with one input and two pay-to-public-key outputs – canonical for the client’s first builds – settled in block 170. The on-chain receipt remains accessible through public indexers and mempool archives.

Finney, a noted cryptographer and early cypherpunk developer, downloaded the software on release and worked directly with Nakamoto in the project’s first week. Contemporary histories and archival reporting identify Finney as the first recipient of BTC and place the transaction on January 12, 2009, three days after the open-source client went live.

Industry retrospectives published on January 12, 2026, highlight the transfer’s anniversary and its outsized cultural impact: a low-value “test” payment that demonstrated end-to-end peer-to-peer settlement without intermediaries, setting a reference point for Bitcoin’s subsequent adoption.

Technically, the payment predated the now-ubiquitous P2PKH format, using bare pay-to-public-key outputs produced by the original client. Developer documentation and code libraries still cite this hash as the canonical example of the network’s first spend, underscoring how early transaction templates evolved as the protocol hardened.

Finney’s role extends beyond being the first payee. Long-form profiles trace his contributions from reusable proof-of-work concepts to early testing, as well as his later battle with ALS – context that explains why his name remains inseparable from Bitcoin’s formative period.

While the Genesis block (January 3, 2009) inaugurated the chain, the Satoshi-to-Finney payment became the first visible exchange of value between two users. Seventeen years later, the transaction is still queryable on modern explorers, preserving the precise timestamp, block inclusion and serialization that marked Bitcoin’s earliest days.