It's been 14 years since first transaction of bitcoin took place, 12 January 2009 satoshi send first 50 bitcoins to Hal Finney. Today these 50 bitcoins are worth 902,319 USD.
Hal Finney is no more and I am sure those 50 bitcoins are lost on bitcoin blockchain forever.
RIP HAL FINNEY, thank you for being first ever receipt of bitcoins.
[img width=140]https://i.imgur.com/tRi4NsK.jpeg Image from blockchain.com
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I wonder?
There could have been some back and forth involving those 50 BTC.. My understanding is that in that first transaction Satoshi sent 10 BTC to Hal and then 40 BTC were sent back to Satoshi as change.
Thanks for correcting me. I read too that first transaction was of 10 BTC but on blockchain.com it says 50 BTC. So its very much possible that 40 BTC were sent back to Satoshi.
I don't claim to be smart enough to trace all of the transaction history associated with each of those coins.. yet some people are pretty good at deciphering various information from transactions and attempting to determine where they are at or if they might still be in active addresses.. but hard to know that, too, and surely we know that UTXOs end up being commingled with the passage of time.. so each of the blocks of the original 10 BTC transaction to Hal and 40 BTC change transaction that was sent back to Satoshi would have necessarily continued to have been sent over and over and over and mixed with various other BTC along the way (UTXOs).
Well in early days when bitcoin was almost around zero USD. People rarely took it serous and we have many stories where people got bitcoins and never take care of them. When bitcoin price went up and they went back to get there bTCs, they found that they have lost the details to access bitcoin.
There are many Bitcoins residing on blockchain that are found to be dead forever
Right before Hal died, he did say that he was putting his BTC into the hands of his kids (family) or something like that ... need to be moved in order to verify that there is still access to the private keys associated with the at-issue addresses.
If Hal has given details of his BTC to family members and the family took care of them then defiantly that would have been a big financial help for family of HAL.