The First Transfer

I WAS THE RECIPIENT.

Satoshi Nakamoto’s 10 BTC transfer to Hal Finney was recorded in Bitcoin block 170 in January 2009.

The whitepaper has become a paper plane. It crosses a single line of light above the Pacific, carrying ten bitcoin towards the California coast. In the clouds beneath it, two hands almost touch. It is a picture of an idea finding someone else: Bitcoin's first known transfer from one person to another.

In January 2009, Hal Finney downloaded Satoshi Nakamoto's newly released Bitcoin software and began testing it. He later recalled that he may have been the first person besides Satoshi to run it. The two corresponded while Hal reported bugs and Satoshi fixed them. Their experiment included a transfer of 10 BTC from Satoshi to Hal. That transaction appears in block 170, whose recorded timestamp is 12 January 2009 at 03:30:25 UTC. The timestamp belongs to the block; it is not a record of the exact moment the two people pressed send and received it.

Hal's own account called it a test. The ten coins were not a purchase, a salary or a bet on their future price. This was a small but decisive step beyond a program that one person could run: another person could receive value through it. Years later Hal described himself, in a few plain words, as the recipient of the first bitcoin transaction.

The artwork puts the receiving point near the Santa Barbara area, where Hal lived in 2009. Satoshi's physical location is not established, so the glowing origin and flight path are deliberately symbolic. A transaction did not travel by aircraft or follow a geographic great-circle route. The single arc is a visual way to make the handoff legible; the nearly hidden cloud hands reward a second look.