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.
Image from blockchain.com
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.
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).
I am sure some guys here are more proficient at such tracing of coins topic and could tell us the story of what happened to each branch of those original BTC and how they might have moved down to the satoshi.. and from my understanding Satoshi did not do a whole hell of a lot of transactions with various BTC that were attributable to him, but it is quite possible that either Hal passed his 10 BTC on within some other transaction or maybe right now Hal's family has those funds (the 10 BTC).
Right before Hal died, he did say that he was putting his BTC into the hands of his kids (family) or something like that... but it is not really clear how many coins that Hal's family members might have and maybe that part about whether they still have the coins or not does not matter too much either on a public knowledge level.. even though some times some of that information regarding how long it has been since certain coins have been moved or certain satoshis (which is seems to be the default unit of the bitcoin blockchain, even though the lightning network allows for transacting down to 1/1000th of a satoshi from my understanding) can be traced, but it is not always easy to know whether people still have access to coins that they originally had access to, especially if the coins had not moved for a while and/or that if there had not been any other activities related to wallets associated with otherwise seemingly dormant coins, such as carrying out of a signature verification that would not require any coins to actually need to be moved in order to verify that there is still access to the private keys associated with the at-issue addresses.