2026-09-03
Who Satoshi Handed Bitcoin To — And Who Got the First-Ever BTC Transaction
Satoshi Nakamoto didn’t just vanish and leave the project to fend for itself — there was a handoff, and it went to a specific person most casual Bitcoin owners have never heard of.
Gavin Andresen: the developer who got the keys
By 2010, Satoshi had been corresponding with a small circle of early developers, and Gavin Andresen was one of the most active. As Satoshi started stepping back from public involvement, he handed Andresen the “alert key” — a special cryptographic key that could broadcast network-wide alerts to Bitcoin nodes — and access to the project’s source code repository. Andresen effectively became Bitcoin’s lead maintainer, the closest thing the project had to someone in charge, right as its actual creator was disappearing for good.
Andresen later founded the Bitcoin Foundation to support the software’s development and spent years as the public face of Bitcoin’s technical side, giving talks and interviews that Satoshi never would. He’s also, notably, one of the small number of people who has publicly said he believes Craig Wright’s Satoshi claim holds some weight — a position most of the Bitcoin development community has strongly disagreed with, especially after the 2024 court ruling against Wright.
Hal Finney: the first person to receive Bitcoin
On January 12, 2009, just days after the network launched, Satoshi sent 10 BTC to a cryptographer named Hal Finney, in block 170 — the first Bitcoin transaction ever sent between two people. Finney wasn’t a random recipient; he was one of Bitcoin’s earliest and most technically serious supporters, had downloaded the software on its release day, and exchanged emails directly with Satoshi as an early tester.
Finney’s role in Bitcoin’s first moments, combined with his cryptography background and geographic proximity to Dorian Nakamoto (whose real name briefly fueled a completely unrelated Satoshi theory in 2014), has made him one of the most persistently discussed Satoshi candidates — something covered in more depth in our piece on who Satoshi might actually be. Finney died in 2014 from complications related to ALS, which hasn’t stopped the speculation.
Why this handoff mattered
Bitcoin surviving its creator’s disappearance wasn’t automatic — it depended on there being other people who understood the code well enough to keep it running, fix bugs, and coordinate upgrades without a single point of failure. Andresen holding that role during Bitcoin’s fragile early years is a big part of why the project didn’t just quietly die when Satoshi stopped answering emails in 2011.
Whether a currency being handed off between a handful of early developers, rather than run by an accountable institution, counts as a strength or a risk is exactly the question Chapter 5, “Who Controls Bitcoin?”, takes seriously in The Bitcoin Skeptic’s Guide instead of glossing over.