For 17 years, Hal Finney held an unofficial crown. He was Bitcoin's second user, the man who mined block 78 on January 10, 2009, earning the first coinbase reward after Satoshi Nakamoto. Thousands of articles have cemented this claim. Now a forensic analysis suggests the ledger may need rewriting.
Researcher Alex Waltz published evidence this week arguing that Dustin Trammell was actually running mining-capable Bitcoin software before Finney ever launched his node. The catch: a bug in Bitcoin version 0.1.1 silenced Trammell's connection to the network, so his machine never produced a block that made it onto the chain.
The software bug that rewrote history
In early January 2009, running Bitcoin was a single bundled operation. The wallet, node, and CPU miner came baked into one client. You started the software and it ran by default. Mining was just a switch flip away. Passive node operators, common today, barely existed then.
On January 12, Trammell emailed Nakamoto saying he'd been running version 0.1.1 for a while. Nakamoto's response the next day identified the culprit: a communications thread that would lock up silently after accepting connections. "When you found a block, you couldn't broadcast it to the network, so it didn't get into the chain," Nakamoto wrote. He added that the bug was fixed in version 0.1.3. As an apology, Nakamoto offered to send Trammell coins to compensate for the foregone reward.
When you found a block, you couldn't broadcast it to the network, so it didn't get into the chain,
Waltz anchored his timeline reconstruction on this email exchange. Trammell's timestamps show he was running the software first. But the bug meant he never actually mined a block before Finney's block 78 hit the chain on January 10. Trammell's unbroadcasted blocks, by Waltz's read, support the connectivity story Nakamoto described.
What counts as being "second"?
The reframing hinges on a definition. Finney definitely mined the first coinbase reward after Nakamoto. That's an on-chain fact. But did actually mining constitute being the second user, or did simply running a mining-capable node come first? Waltz is staking the latter claim. Trammell himself now maintains on his venture fund's website that he ran the second node on Bitcoin's network, though he admits in his own words that he never flipped the mining switch to outpace Finney.
Waltz's argument isn't airtight. Running software while not mining raises genuine questions about what "second user" even means in a network where most participants today are passive node operators with no mining capability at all. But the email trail from Nakamoto and the timestamps do add pressure to a claim that's gone unchallenged for nearly two decades.
Finney, who died in 2014 after a long illness, never had a chance to weigh in on the revised history. His role as Bitcoin's second early adopter has long been treated as settled fact. Waltz's forensic dig suggests the early network's story may be messier and less documented than the community has assumed.