Running Bitcoin: The Story of Hal Finney, Block 170
On January 12, 2009, at half past three in the morning UTC, ten coins moved from one computer to another. The amount was meaningless — bitcoin had no price, no exchange, and no market to set one. What mattered was the act: value moving across a network with no bank, no company, and nobody in charge. The coins landed in the wallet of a 52-year-old cryptographer named Hal Finney, who for the previous few days had been doing something almost no one else on earth was doing — actually running the software. He had announced it to the world in two words that bitcoiners still repeat today: "Running bitcoin."
The cypherpunk who was already there
Finney was no random early adopter. He was the second developer on PGP, the encryption software that put strong cryptography in the hands of ordinary people and badly annoyed the U.S. government for doing it. He was a fixture on the 1990s cypherpunk mailing list, where a small group of programmers argued that privacy and digital cash were the only defense against a surveilled future. In 2004 — five years before Bitcoin — he built RPOW, or Reusable Proof of Work, a system for passing digital tokens that couldn't be copied or spent twice. It still leaned on trusted hardware, so it never quite took off, but the idea was the right shape. Finney had been chasing digital money for two decades.
So when an unknown coder calling himself Satoshi Nakamoto posted a nine-page white paper to a cryptography mailing list in late 2008, most readers shrugged. Finney didn't. He was, by his own account, fascinated — one of the very few people who read it and immediately understood what it could become.
Block 170
When Satoshi released the first Bitcoin software in early January 2009, Finney downloaded it almost at once, compiled it, and started a node. That made him the second machine on the entire network. He hunted for bugs, sent Satoshi notes, and kept his computer online through the fragile opening days when "the network" was essentially two people in two time zones. On January 12, Satoshi sent him 10 bitcoin as a test. It was recorded as block 170 — the first time bitcoin ever moved between two human beings.
Finney mined some of the earliest blocks too, back when an ordinary desktop CPU was enough to do it. He later switched his miner off because it ran the computer hot and the fan was loud — a decision worth a fortune in hindsight, which he wrote about with complete calm. That was the man: brilliant, early, and entirely unbothered by what he might have left on the table.
The diagnosis
The same year he started running Bitcoin, 2009, Finney was diagnosed with ALS — amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the disease that slowly strips away muscle control while leaving the mind fully intact. Over the next years his body failed him piece by piece. He kept coding anyway, eventually typing through software that tracked his eyes. In March 2013 he published a forum post titled "Bitcoin and me," describing his condition without a trace of self-pity and his coins — set aside for his family — with measured hope that they might matter one day.
Because he lived in the same small California town as a man named Dorian Nakamoto, and because his prose was so clean, some have wondered whether Finney himself was Satoshi. He denied it plainly, and the evidence — including the early emails between the two men — backs him. He was not Bitcoin's creator. He was its first believer.
Running, still
Hal Finney died on August 28, 2014. In keeping with beliefs he had held for decades, his body was cryopreserved. His two-word tweet became the most quoted line in the culture, and his wife Fran turned it into something physical: the annual Running Bitcoin Challenge, a fundraiser for ALS research where people log the miles he no longer could. The network he kept alive when it was just him and Satoshi now runs on tens of thousands of nodes across every continent.
What to actually take from it
Finney's story isn't only lore — it's a short list of things any holder can still do:
- Run a node. He verified the rules himself instead of trusting someone else's word for them. You can do the same today with Bitcoin Core, an Umbrel, or a Start9 box.
- Hold your own keys. His coins were his, kept under his own control — the whole point of the system he helped prove worked.
- Plan for inheritance. He documented his holdings so they could outlive him. It is the step almost everyone skips. Write down how someone you trust can reach your coins if you no longer can.
Sixteen years after block 170, the experiment Finney ran on a noisy desktop in Santa Barbara is still running. That is the whole idea — it does not stop because any one person does.
If those two words mean something to you, wear them like they do. BitCloset makes heavyweight apparel for people who run their own nodes and hold their own keys — cypherpunk clothing for a culture that started with a handful of people who refused to look away.