Ordinal Sats from Hal Finney’s First Mined Bitcoin Block Have Been Found
Note: Ordinal theory is a layer of social consensus built on top of the Bitcoin blockchain. If you do not believe in or adhere to this consensus, then you are free to move on with your life and not waste your precious minutes reading this article.
Introduction
Thanks to Ordinal theory, sats from block 78, the first ever block mined by someone other than Satoshi Nakamoto, have finally been found and secured. They initially belonged to the late cypherpunk Hal Finney. May he rest in peace.
This block reward coinbase transaction timestamp precedes the one of the 10 BTC transaction that Satoshi Nakamoto sent to Hal a day later, albeit the sats received by Hal from Satoshi are older, of course.
Hal Finney & Satoshi Nakamoto
Hal became a public figure to the Bitcoin community as he was the first person besides Satoshi to start mining Bitcoin and the only person known to have ever received a transaction directly from Satoshi Nakamoto.
Hal’s mining experience started two days after receiving an email from Satoshi Nakamoto’s Cryptography Mailing List, “Thought you’d like to know, the Bitcoin v0.1 release with EXE and full source code is up on Sourceforge;…” From there, he’d continue a direct exchange with Satoshi working on various bugs in versions 0.1.0 through to 0.1.3, as shared here.
The Search
After weeks of searching for many special sats, I found these extremely old range from block 78 and quickly found out that they were mined by Hal Finney, highly regarded as the right-hand man to Satoshi Nakamoto. I also realized that block 78 was the first block Hal ever mined, around the same time he tweeted this famous first tweet about Bitcoin:
The only older sats to exist are therefore sats that Satoshi Nakamoto mined in block 9 and were used as an input for the 10 BTC that were sent to Hal Finney. If Satoshi never returns, these 10 BTC (1 billion sats) will be the only sats in circulation timestamped earlier than the ones I have found. It is unknown exactly how many block 9 sats are still moving to this day, but we will soon find out: Greg from the Ordicord is currently working on tracing the location of these sats.
How did I find these sats so quickly?
I used the most basic technique which is sifting through exchanges. There are many more advanced techniques as mentioned by Psifour: Lightning channels, STACKS sifting, etc. I encourage everyone to search for sats, all you need is a UTXO received, and Ordinals.com.
What am I going to do with these sats?
I have found and stored a total of 2,833 sats. That’s not a lot, so I am planning on doing the following:
- ??
- Inscribe some for the OG Ordinal contributors.
Will I keep hunting for sats?
There will always be more subjectively cool sats to find. I’m going to be balancing interacting with the community, sat hunting and inscribing cool stuff. Ordinal theory relates more to sat hunting than inscriptions in my opinion, and I believe Casey was right to be excited about it. There’s a reason I never sold or auctioned off previous 2009 sats. There is a huge amount of them. So I’m focusing on finding the ones that are interesting to me, and hopefully, to other people too.
Looking Forward
To Casey, Post Capone, Greg, Rijndael, Psifour, Charlie, Udi, Dennis, Oren and a lot of others who I’m probably forgetting that are building up the infrastructure for Bitcoin & Ordinal ecosystem:
It’s crazy to think that up until just a month ago, I had never touched a Bitcoin node or anything Bitcoin related besides receiving and sending Bitcoin with a web wallet and Binance, and this, years ago. Thanks to you all, I’ve learned a lot of what I missed out on, and I’m extremely excited for the future.
While simultaneously learning about Bitcoin’s UTXO model, Ordinal theory, creating bridges for my previous Ethereum projects, inscribing, and tons of other stuff — I was rocking a PFP from my Distortion collection — which is literally an Ethereum logo.
Not once have any of these Bitcoin legends mentioned or frowned upon it or made a comment about it. Hell, I even inscribed all those Distortion SVGs on Bitcoin. It’s like they knew that the rabbit hole I was in was more important than me changing my profile picture and I commend them for it.
They went above and beyond helping me with specific questions, to pushing me to learn new things (such as building a custom ord client) to even helping seed new ideas in my head. My excitement and motivation to learn along with their help has really made the last month insanely exciting.
It’s really insane how much I have learned over the past month. I couldn’t have done it without all the amazing people on the forefront of Ordinals tech putting in an insane amount of work every day.
My one wish is that people start learning about Ordinal theory and start sat hunting. The era of inscriptions will never be over, but the era of sat hunting must begin at once. Anything and everything I do is thanks to the Bitcoin/Ordinal community builders.
All knowledge and innovation comes from them, and is bestowed upon everybody else, including me. So take it, be thankful for it and build with it.
I am committed to continuing to innovate and push my abilities into Bitcoin-native tech such as PSBTs and other trustless paradigms, and I invite you to join me on this exciting journey. No more Ethereum bridges for Ordinal projects.
Cheers,
Nullish
To learn more, please visit:
