2009 · 4 recorded events
What happened in crypto in 2009? All 4 events on this timeline, including First Bitcoin Transaction: Satoshi to Hal Finney — each dated, categorised and sourced.
2009 is the year Bitcoin went from paper to running code. The genesis block was mined on 3 January with a newspaper headline embedded in its coinbase; the v0.1 client, already containing the 21 million cap and the four-year halving schedule, followed six days later; three days after that, Satoshi sent 10 BTC to Hal Finney in the first transfer between two users. For most of the year the network had no price at all. That changed in October, when New Liberty Standard published a rate derived from the electricity cost of mining — 1,309.03 BTC to the dollar, the first time bitcoin was quoted in fiat.
By category, 2009 breaks down into two network launches, one technical milestone and one market milestone.
Technical Milestones
Network Launches
Market Milestones
Every entry gives the date it happened, its category, a factual summary, and links to the original source and to the same entry in the full timeline.
Block 0 carried the coinbase message "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks," both a timestamp and a statement of purpose. Its 50 BTC reward is unspendable by design, and the network ran on a single node for six days.
Satoshi released the Windows client with full source on SourceForge, announcing it to the Cryptography list. The 0.1 release already contained the 21 million cap, the four-year halving schedule, difficulty adjustment and a built-in CPU miner — the monetary policy has not changed since.
In block 170, Satoshi sent 10 BTC to Hal Finney, the second person to run the software. It was the first transfer of value between two Bitcoin users and proved that the transaction and verification path worked outside the creator's own machine.
New Liberty Standard published a rate of 1,309.03 BTC per US dollar, derived from the electricity cost of mining. It was the first time bitcoin was priced in fiat at all, implying a value of about $0.00076 per coin.
This archive keeps a page for every year from 2008 to 2026. The sparser pre-Bitcoin entries from 1979 onward live in the full timeline.
