A look into the early history of BTC

On January 12th, 2009, Hal Finney received the first peer to peer transaction on the BTC network from Satoshi Nakamoto, worth 10 BTC. ¹

In the first 2 months up till March 1st 2009, there were hardly any real peer to peer transactions. Looking through the wallets that had untouched balances (0 outputs), from this period, only 32 addresses were found to qualify for having a ‘peer to peer’ transaction.
On a total of 5999 blocks, that’s just 0.53 %.
If you compare it to current block height of 938423 as I’m writing this, that is 0.0034 % compared to total number of blocks.
According to Glassnode data the total addresses ever created has surpassed 1 Billion as of February 2026. Compared to that these wallets make up only 0.0000032 % of all addresses.

In other words, these wallets are EXTREMELY RARE.

It’s widely accepted that only IT professionals, cryptographers, and (other) insiders had access to BTC at this point.
This kind of wallet is not something you would ever find on your late great aunt’s attic in other words. 🤠
There is not one of these wallets that can move without a bunch of forensic/intelligence agencies noticing.

¹ https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/transactions/btc/f4184fc596403b9d638783cf57adfe4c75c605f6356fbc91338530e9831e9e16

A look into the early history of BTC was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.