Bitcoin History Timeline 2008–2010: The Moments That Started It

Bitcoin went from an idea to a working currency in about two years: the bitcoin.org domain was registered on 18 August 2008, the whitepaper was published on 31 October 2008, the network started with the genesis block on 3 January 2009, and the first well-known purchase with bitcoin, two pizzas, happened on 22 May 2010. Everything in between, from the first software release to the first exchange, filled in the pieces.

Below is each key moment from 2008 to 2010, with what happened and where you can check it. Three of these dates are printed on MOOD shirts, so we've marked those too.

Quick timeline

Date	What happened
18 Aug 2008	The domain bitcoin.org is registered
31 Oct 2008	Satoshi Nakamoto posts the Bitcoin Whitepaper to a cryptography mailing list
3 Jan 2009	The genesis block (block 0) is mined, with a Times headline inside it
8 Jan 2009	Satoshi announces Bitcoin v0.1 on the same mailing list
9 Jan 2009	The first open-source Bitcoin client is released on SourceForge
11 Jan 2009 (UTC)	Hal Finney posts "Running bitcoin"
12 Jan 2009	The first Bitcoin transaction: 10 BTC from Satoshi to Hal Finney, in block 170
22 May 2010	Bitcoin Pizza Day: 10,000 BTC for two Papa John's pizzas
18 Jul 2010	Mt. Gox launches its Bitcoin exchange
15 Aug 2010	The value overflow bug is exploited, then fixed within hours
Dec 2010	Satoshi's public involvement in development ends

2008: the idea

18 August 2008: bitcoin.org is registered

The first public trace of Bitcoin is a domain name. bitcoin.org was registered on 18 August 2008, more than two months before anyone outside a small circle could have known what it was for.

31 October 2008: the whitepaper

On Halloween 2008, a link to a nine-page paper titled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System was posted to a cryptography mailing list under the name Satoshi Nakamoto. It described "a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust": digital cash that solves double-spending with a public chain of proof-of-work.

We've told the story of that release in the Bitcoin Whitepaper anniversary and walked through every section in the Bitcoin Whitepaper explained.

On a shirt: the MOOD Whitepaper T-shirt prints all nine pages of the paper across the shirt.

2009: the network goes live

3 January 2009: the genesis block

Bitcoin's network began when Satoshi mined block 0, known as the genesis block. It carried a reward of 50 bitcoins, and inside its first transaction Satoshi embedded a line of text: "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks."

That is a real front-page headline from The Times of London on that day. It works as a timestamp, proving the block couldn't have been made earlier, and it's often read as a comment on the 2008 banking crisis. We explain the headline and how to read it from the raw block data in what the Genesis Block message means.

On a shirt: the MOOD Genesis T-shirt carries that exact headline on the chest.

8–9 January 2009: Bitcoin v0.1 is released

Satoshi announced the software on the cryptography mailing list with an email titled "Bitcoin v0.1 released," dated 8 January 2009 at 19:27 UTC in the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute archive. It opens: "Announcing the first release of Bitcoin, a new electronic cash system that uses a peer-to-peer network to prevent double-spending."

The first open-source client was published on SourceForge on 9 January 2009. Block 1 followed that day, six days after the genesis block.

11 January 2009: "Running bitcoin"

Hal Finney, a cryptographer and one of the first people to run the software, posted two words on Twitter: "Running bitcoin." X's own record dates the post to 03:33 UTC on 11 January 2009, which was the evening of 10 January in California where Finney lived. It remains one of the most quoted posts in Bitcoin history.

12 January 2009: the first Bitcoin transaction

Satoshi sent 10 BTC to Hal Finney, the first transaction from one person to another on the network. It was recorded in block 170.

Other early supporters included Wei Dai, who designed the earlier b-money proposal, and Nick Szabo, who designed bit gold. Both ideas fed into the thinking Bitcoin drew on.

2010: bitcoin meets the real world

22 May 2010: Bitcoin Pizza Day

Laszlo Hanyecz, a programmer in Jacksonville, Florida, offered 10,000 BTC on the Bitcointalk forum for two pizzas. Another forum user, jercos, took the deal and had two Papa John's pizzas delivered to him. The payment was confirmed in block 57,043. The coins were worth roughly $41 at the time, by forum estimates.

It's often called the first real-world purchase with bitcoin, and the date is now marked every year as Bitcoin Pizza Day. The full on-chain details, including the transaction hash, are in our Bitcoin Pizza Day post.

On a shirt: the MOOD Pizza T-shirt has that transaction hash printed around the sleeve cuffs.

18 July 2010: Mt. Gox opens

Jed McCaleb read about Bitcoin on Slashdot in July 2010 and decided the community needed a place to trade it for regular money. He reused a domain he already owned, mtgox.com, and launched its exchange and price service on 18 July 2010. Mt. Gox went on to become the largest Bitcoin exchange before its collapse in 2014, but in 2010 it simply made buying and selling bitcoin easier.

15 August 2010: the value overflow incident

A bug in how the software added up transaction outputs let someone create bitcoin out of nothing. On 15 August 2010, a single transaction created just over 92 billion BTC for each of two addresses. It was spotted within hours, a fixed version of the software was released, and miners moved to a chain that left the bad transaction out. It no longer appears in Bitcoin's history today.

It's a useful reminder that early Bitcoin was experimental software, and that the network's rules held because people fixed problems in public.

December 2010: Satoshi steps back

Satoshi was active in developing Bitcoin and posting on its forum until December 2010. After that, the work passed to other developers, with Gavin Andresen taking the lead. By then Bitcoin had a whitepaper, a running network, a first purchase and a first exchange, and it no longer needed its creator to keep going.

Why these three dates matter to MOOD

We design shirts around moments you can verify, not slogans. The whitepaper, the genesis block and the pizza transaction are each a fixed point: a document, a block and a transaction anyone can look up. If you want to wear the early history of Bitcoin, all three designs are on our Bitcoin T-shirts page.