Back in January 12, 2009… Bitcoin was basically a science experiment.
That day, Satoshi Nakamoto sent the very first Bitcoin transaction ever to a developer named Hal Finney. No hype. No price charts. No Twitter. Just two guys testing code.
What’s wild is Hal didn’t even know who Satoshi really was. Later on, Finney said Satoshi’s identity was a total mystery. From their emails, he guessed Satoshi might be a young Japanese guy super smart, very calm, very sincere. And that’s it. No face. No name. Just ideas.
Now here’s the crazy part.
Fast forward to 2014, Hal looked back and talked about those early days. Bitcoin was still super experimental. Mining difficulty? One. You could mine Bitcoin on a regular home computer. No GPUs. No ASICs. Just a normal CPU.
Hal mined a few blocks… and then he turned his computer off.
Why?
Because it was getting hot. The fan was loud. That’s it.
No jokehe shut it down because it was annoying.
At the time, nobody knew what Bitcoin would become. Not Satoshi. Not Hal. Not anyone. It wasn’t “digital gold.” It wasn’t a trillion-dollar asset. It was just an idea… running quietly on a noisy computer.
And that’s what makes this moment so powerful.
Bitcoin didn’t start with hype. It didn’t start with big money. It started with curiosity, experimentation, and uncertainty.