Sent from satoshi@vistomail.com on Thursday, January 8, 2009 at 20:54:55 PST — just hours after the public announcement on the Cryptography mailing list — Satoshi personally notified Hal Finney of the Bitcoin release:
Thought you’d like to know, the Bitcoin v0.1 release with EXE and full sourcecode is up on Sourceforge: http://downloads.sourceforge.net/bitcoin/bitcoin-0.1.0.rar
www.bitcoin.org has release notes and screenshots.
Satoshi
This brief personal email shows that Satoshi valued Finney’s involvement enough to send a private notification in addition to the public announcement. Finney responded by downloading the software and posting his famous “Running bitcoin” tweet on January 11, 2009. The next day, January 12, Satoshi sent Finney 10 BTC in block 170 — the first known person-to-person Bitcoin transaction.
Hal Finney later recalled in his “Bitcoin and me” post (March 2013): “I carried on an email conversation with Satoshi over the next few days, mostly me reporting bugs and him fixing them.”
[Source: Published by CoinDesk, November 26, 2020. Original files from Hal Finney’s personal computer, provided by Fran Finney to Nathaniel Popper in March 2014.]