#767: The First Bitcoin Miner with Alex Waltz

July 6, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

In January 2009, the Bitcoin network was a ghost town. For the first two days after Satoshi mined the genesis block, the blockchain crawled forward at a halting, erratic pace. There were eight multi-hour gaps between blocks—one lasting over 24 hours. The network kept stalling. The standard story has long been that Hal Finney was the first person to join Satoshi, tweeting "running bitcoin" on January 11, 2009. But researcher and filmmaker Alex Waltz spent months digging into the raw data—the debug logs, the IRC channel records, the blockchain itself—and found that the real story is messier, more fragile, and far more revealing about what it actually took to get Bitcoin off the ground.

The Debug Log and the Three Nodes

Waltz started where many had looked before: Hal Finney's debug.log file, which records everything a Bitcoin node does. The file is still downloadable today. What Waltz realized is that while people had referenced this file, no one had actually gone through it line by line. When he did, he found something that had been hiding in plain sight.

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What you'll learn

1 (00:40) **Why This Investigation Exists** - Alex Waltz explains his motivation to dig into the earliest days of Bitcoin, feeling the Hal Finney story was "soft" and under-researched.
2 (04:42) **The IRC Channel and Node Usernames** - How early Bitcoin nodes used IRC to find peers, and how usernames were deterministically generated from IP addresses.
3 (09:52) **Block 49: Hal Finney's Entry Point** - The debug.log reveals Hal's node synced up to block 49, confirming the state of the blockchain when he first connected.
4 (11:52) **The "Do Not Mine Unless Connected to a Peer" Rule** - Satoshi's code prevented solo mining to avoid accidental forks, which shaped the early network's dynamics.
5 (17:13) **The Tor Node Mystery and Dustin Trammell's Claim** - Alex investigates a Tor node in the IRC channel and revisits Dustin Trammell's 2018 claim of being the first miner.
6 (27:24) **Analyzing Block Times and the Patoshi Pattern** - Alex finds eight large time gaps in the first 170 blocks, indicating the network halted repeatedly.
7 (49:00) **Connecting the Tor Node to Satoshi** - The time gaps align perfectly with resets in the extra nonce counter, suggesting the same entity controlled both the clear net and Tor nodes.

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Show Notes

Marty sits down with Alex Waltz to discuss his forensic investigation into Bitcoin's first seventy-two hours, which uncovers that Satoshi Nakamoto likely ran both a clearnet and Tor node to bootstrap the network, reveals Hal Finney as the third node but second person to join, and exposes how the nascent blockchain ground to a halt eight separate times.

Alex on X: https://x.com/raw_avocado

Alex’s Website: https://alexwaltz.com/

Alex on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AlexWaltz21/

Alex’s Findings: https://1stbitcoinminer.com/

STACK SATS hat: https://tftcmerch.io/

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