#767: The First Bitcoin Miner with Alex Waltz

**SPEAKER_1** (0:07)
You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free.
When you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:18)
I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:29)
I mean, that's part of the bold case for Bitcoin.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:31)
If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.

**Marty Bent** (0:36)
The hottest man in Bitcoin this week, Alex Waltz. Welcome to the show.

**Alex Waltz** (0:40)
Thank you, Marty. Thank you for having me. When he says hot, just to be clear, he does mean physically hot, not in other ways.

**Marty Bent** (0:47)
He has a double entendre. It's physically hot and main character vibes this week with the video that you launched after doing many months of research and production, getting back to the roots of what started Bitcoin and trying to dissect who was the first person to launch, or excuse me, to get into the Bitcoin project after Satoshi. Many people flagged Hal Finney in his node after he tweeted running Bitcoin. But your piece argues that the real story is messier, more interesting.
I think for the context of diving into your piece, First Bitcoin Miner, and the video associated with it, which will link to the show notes, what set you down this journey? Why was this a nagging problem in your mind to solve?

**Alex Waltz** (1:38)
Well, for people who follow me on Twitter, they know for the last years, I just really dove into this Bitcoin archaeology stuff.
There were two instances, one last year and one year before, where I did 30 days of Bitcoin facts.
Clearly, the historical one made a bit more sense, and I just happened to be more interested in them.
I realized that I want to find out more about this Hal Finney stuff, but I never really touched it because it always felt solved to me.
Just how many times did you hear people mention the emails, and there's always this air of like, it's solved, we know exactly what happened, and it just feels like this has me around for such a long time. Clearly, there's nothing to find there anymore, right? And I decided to write a thread about the Hal Finney, and I just could not believe there's nothing written about this, right? Like, zilch, nothing. I mean, there's an article here and there, but nothing concrete, right? Just people claiming certain things. And I found it so strange, and then I was like, all right, you know what, let's try to dig into this. And I started looking and looking and looking, and I was like, oh my God, I think I'm the first person who looks at this. I just could not, like the first part was I could not believe no one looked at this because it's such a low-hanging fruit, first of all, right? And after this, after I started digging a bit of things, I was like, oh my God, there's some interesting stuff here. And firstly, I figured out what Bitcoin client he was running when he made the Bitcoin tweet. And then when I did, I found the debug.log file. So when Hal Finney tried Bitcoin for the first time, it didn't work for him. And there is to be this forum called Search Forge where people would post about Bitcoin. And the first time he wrote, he tried Bitcoin, it didn't work. He posted on this forum, what Satoshi was literally the fourth or something day. And then the Bitcoin node at the time has a debug.log file, which is a file that saves everything that happens, right? This is not new. This was known. Other people wrote about this. And you can download it still today. And when I started looking at that file, I've realized that actually no one actually re-looked at what the files means. And I went line by line, line by line. And when I saw there's two other other people also, sorry, there you could also see Satoshi's ClearNet IP. And we'll probably get into this a bit more in depth and whatever. But you can see the other two nodes. And when I saw the two other nodes there, which again, this is undeniable, posted by Hal, this is there's nothing speculative about this part. You can see it there. And when I saw that, I mean, I couldn't believe it. I was like, oh my God, I was like, that's the idea, yes. I started jumping around. I was, you know, I was bowing to the ground and I was just so happy. And I mean, I know I'm kind of rambling right now, but like there's just so much to it. And that's kind of when I was like, all right, let's just see where this goes deeper. And there was obviously more.