"In 2008 it was a ‘hodgepodge’, he said. I asked him if he felt the development of bitcoin was, at some level, a response to the financial crisis. ‘It was already in process. I saw [the crisis] coming though. It was a kind of perfect storm. During that year, I spoke to Wei Dai. So between him and Hal Finney there were a lot of really good ideas about making money work … [Finney] was the one who actually took what I said seriously. He received the first bitcoin.’"

The Satoshi Affair.
Andrew O’Hagan in the #LRB:
30 June 2016
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n13/andrew-ohagan/the-satoshi-affair

"...The Genesis block is the one that didn’t crash.’ There from the beginning was Hal Finney, who would receive the first bitcoin transaction, on block 9. This was a key moment for the new cryptocurrency: block 9 for ever shows that Satoshi sent Finney ten bitcoin on 12 January 2009 – it is the first outgoing transaction we know to have come from Satoshi. Satoshi also sent four other transactions on the same day. I asked Wright who the recipients were – who the four addresses belonged to. ‘Hal, Dave, myself,’ he replied. ‘And another I cannot name as I have no right to do so.’ Wright told me that around this time he was in correspondence with Wei Dai, with Gavin Andresen, who would go on to lead the development of bitcoin, and Mike Hearn, a Google engineer who had ideas about the direction bitcoin should take...."


The Satoshi Affair.
Andrew O’Hagan in the #LRB:
30 June 2016
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n13/andrew-ohagan/the-satoshi-affair