‏@marttimalmi posted  on his twitter feed a few months ago the following message:

"Found the first known bitcoin to USD transaction from my email backups. I sold 5,050 BTC for $5,02 on 2009-10-12. https:/[Suspicious link removed]/8XcBmzJljf "

I was confused by some aspects of this transaction.

I didn't think that BTC valuations were that high that early. The pizza story in 2010 gets all the press, but I have seen New Liberty Standard references for $1 = 1,309.03 BTC.

In any case, Martti appears to have begun mining in early April 2009 and continued into October just before he spent the 5050 BTC. Martti's earliest block number was a little over 10,000 - indicating that there was a lot of mining from January into April.

Yet, by mid October 2009, Martti's spend was only at block 24835.

The difficulty didn't change from 1 until the end of the year, Is that because both Satoshi and various early adopters stopped mining or am I missing something about the gating of the hashing rate?

Edit: This is the blockchain link https://blockchain.info/tx/7dff938918f07619abd38e4510890396b1cef4fbeca154fb7aafba8843295ea2