A bitcoiner has claimed, this November 27, to be the owner of the private keys of one of the first Bitcoin addresses.
This is the address of someone who had been a miner and on January 19, 2009 (just 10 days following the birth of Bitcoin) had received 50 bitcoin (BTC) as a reward for his activity.
In the foro Bitcointalk the community was asked if they might share their oldest Bitcoin addresses. This user, identified as OneSignatureshared an encrypted message with a private key corresponding to a public address January 2009.
The user in question remains anonymous and, according to data from the forum, it is a new account with very little activity. The address is empty, no funds.
The coming to light of this address of the times in which Satoshi Nakamoto was active, it has caused a stir. Some users began to speculate that the address possibly belonged to the creator of Bitcoin or to those early miners on the network. Nevertheless, some doubted the credibility of the message encrypted by OneSignature, so the user returned to to share another message, confirming the possession of the original address, on November 28.
The address would be related to Hal Finney
Given the number of questions As this movement was awakening, users of the forum undertook the task of investigating a possible origin. In a screenshot shared in the forum, corresponding to the wallet of Hal Finney, the first user to receive a Bitcoin transaction and who died in 2014you can see that there is a relationship to the claimed address.
After receiving the funds in 2009, they remained “asleep” until 2011, the year in which they were transferredalong with another 2000 BTC, to a single address.
When sending Bitcoin funds, the protocol allows funds from different addresses to be used for sending to a single address. This as long as you own the private keys
The list shows that some of the entries in the transactioncoincide both with one of the addresses which was identified as belonging to Finney and another to the user OneSignature. Therefore, it can be expected that the user can have access to the rest of the private keys on the list and, perhaps, to Finney’s bitcoins.
