I've been asked this several times, so here's a definitive answer.
On January 12, 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto sent 10 bitcoins to Hal Finney. This is widely considered the first person-to-person Bitcoin transaction.
The early Bitcoin network was maintained by just a handful of developers. The network got up and running because they were willing to mine using their own computers.
And here's the market update: $BTC is currently at 74856, up 0.25% over the past 24 hours.
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