The claim, then the record.

One further detail is routinely garbled. Block 1 (00000000839a8e6886ab5951d76f411475428afc90947ee320161bbf18eb6048) is timestamped 1231469665 — 9 January 2009 at 02:54:25 UTC. The interval is 463,160 seconds: five days, eight hours, thirty-nine minutes and twenty seconds. The widely repeated "six days" — the Bitcoin Wiki says "a full 6 days" — overstates what the two headers actually record.

Its 50 BTC output has never been spendable — not by design statement, but because the original implementation never put it in the database.

The restriction attaches to that one output, not to the address. Outputs later sent to 1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa enter the UTXO set normally and carry no special constraint; the key itself has no protocol-level disability.

The size of the set has never been settled. BitMEX Research, publishing on 19 August 2018, reconstructed the ExtraNonce slopes independently and concluded the dominant 2009 miner more likely produced "600,000 to 700,000 bitcoin". Their caveat was pointed: "Although there is strong evidence of a dominant miner in 2009, we think the evidence is far less robust than many have assumed."

The identification of the Patoshi set with Satoshi Nakamoto is a contested attribution, not an established fact. Lerner himself writes that "Because the relation is based on unsigned emails and not math, we'll never be sure," and in 2013 said he could not assure with 100% certainty that the pattern's blocks were Satoshi's.

Whale Alert inferred "at least 48 computers, with one machine for coordination"; Lerner's re-mining of the 10,025 Patoshi blocks in the first 13.2K concluded "Patoshi was simply multi-threading in a high-end CPU". Both claims are still in print.

The block timestamp is 12 January 2009 at 03:30:25 UTC, which was 11 January, 19:30 in California — which is why some accounts date it to 11 January.

That the sender was Satoshi Nakamoto rests on Finney's own account and on the contemporaneous email archive he showed Forbes, not on a cryptographic signature; it is a well-corroborated attribution rather than a proof.

Corrected from an earlier draft: the 11 December 'hornet's nest' post was NOT Satoshi's last public forum message. The Nakamoto Institute archive shows one later post, 12 December 2010 at 18:22 UTC, announcing the 0.3.19 build. Any page saying otherwise is wrong.

Bitcoin Magazine reported it took delivery of its 4,000th bitcoin on 12 November 2016, across more than 25,000 incoming transactions over five years. That understates total giving, because WikiLeaks also let donors generate one-off addresses.

The 'half of all transactions' figures vary by source, metric and window: the Fed paper says more than half within weeks and over 40% for most of its life; UCSD says about 60% of overall activity. Both count transactions, not economic value, and are not directly comparable.

The 126,315 BTC sale price is agreed, but the dollar equivalent was reported as $11.5m (CoinDesk) and $12.4m (Bitcoin Magazine), and the buyer has never been identified.

Secondary write-ups disagree on the output arithmetic — 945, 946 and 947 all circulate — because they count the data outputs, the one-satoshi tip and the change differently.

Who created this transaction is unknown and no credible attribution exists. The uploader and downloader tools used in the same burst were labelled with Satoshi Nakamoto's name, which Shirriff assessed as probably false; that label is not evidence of involvement by the whitepaper's author, and the recurring one-satoshi payment to the genesis address is a property of those tools rather than a signed statement by anyone.

Notably, the law said nothing about the state itself accumulating bitcoin. The reserve that followed was a matter of executive practice, not statute.

First, the date of the Bitcoin Law vote: the session ran past midnight and sources split between 8 and 9 June 2021 (Wikipedia says 9 June, the FREOPP full-text edition says 8 June), so the timeline gives both.

Counterparty's own documentation describes the window as "5,000 Bitcoin blocks" running to 3 February 2014, whereas the constants in config.py give blocks 278,310 to 283,810, which is 5,500 blocks, with the closing block mined on 2 February; the code has been preferred.

Published totals for BTC burned also vary, with Wikipedia giving approximately 2,140 BTC, because some counts include coins that arrived at the address outside the valid window; only the in-window figure is stated here.

Contrary to common belief the 10 BTC did not stay put: as of this check the address shows total_received 1004401259 sats and total_sent 1004328551 sats across 53 transactions, so nearly everything received has been spent.

The block-9 coinbase address is the sender's, not Finney's — it belongs to the early-mining set and should not be labelled as his.

The source contains a typographical error - it prints '433,468 BTC' where the on-chain figure is 433.4689 BTC, confirmed this session via mempool.space; the companion figure of 259.74 BTC matches exactly.

Arkham's initial reading of the 4 July movement as a security upgrade rather than a sale was overtaken by the later transfers.

The phrase ‘first Bitcoin transaction’ should be qualified: block 170 is the first widely recognized person-to-person transfer, while genesis and mining transactions predate it.

Bitcoin does not allocate infinitely divisible units, though. Subsidies are integers counted in satoshis, and right shifts discard remainders once successive halvings reach odd values. Summed under the current function, the maximum is 20,999,999.9769 BTC.

The rule is based on block height, not a calendar date: mainnet divides height by a 210,000-block interval. The ten-minute target makes four years a useful approximation, but actual halving dates depend on how quickly blocks are produced.

No. Bitcoin Cash began a separate chain under incompatible rules on 1 August 2017. Nodes enforcing Bitcoin’s existing consensus rules did not treat the new chain’s larger blocks as valid Bitcoin mainnet blocks.

Mt. Gox initially reported almost all of approximately 850,000 BTC missing. After finding 199,999.99 BTC in an old-format wallet, it reported roughly 202,000 BTC held and revised the estimated missing amount to approximately 650,000 BTC; all were company-reported provisional figures.

They also disprove an overly simple mythology: MacroStrategy sold 704 BTC on 22 December 2022 for approximately $11.8 million and acquired 810 BTC two days later. The annual balance still rose, but the filing record does not support saying that the company has literally never sold bitcoin.

Earlier Canadian and European exchange-traded products also form part of global ETP history, but they should not be collapsed into the SEC decision or used to imply that exchange-traded Bitcoin exposure began in 2024.

QuadrigaCX was initially narrated as a lost-key problem after its co-founder’s death. The Ontario Securities Commission’s investigation instead concluded that the collapse resulted from fraud, including misappropriation and fictitious trading.

No protocol-level account balance is stored. Nodes maintain a set of unspent transaction outputs, each with a value and spending condition. Wallet software finds relevant UTXOs and sums them to display a familiar balance.

Ten minutes is therefore an average design target, not a schedule for the next block.