Who Is Hal Finney

Hal Finney was born on May 4, 1956, in Coalinga, California. He graduated in Computer Engineering from the California Institute of Technology (CalTech) in 1979. He later began working as a video game developer, working on well-known titles such as Astroblast and Space Attack. He then went on to collaborate on PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) by Phil Zimmerman, who hired him shortly afterwards.

Hal Finney: Vital to Bitcoin’s Success

With regard to Bitcoin, Hal Finney is known as the person who most supported this cryptocurrency in its early days. After Satoshi published the Whitepaper, Finney was a staunch advocate of the project, so much so that the existing evidence clearly indicates that, after Satoshi, he was the first person to download and run the Bitcoin client.

On January 12, 2009, he received 10 bitcoins from Satoshi in the first bitcoin transaction. During Bitcoin’s first year of life he exchanged many emails with Satoshi to fix bugs in the code.

The Pre-Bitcoin Era

One of his publications ended up being fundamental to Bitcoin: specifically, in 2004 he published RPOW, a revision of HashCash. Earlier, in 1993, he published a study on ‘Detecting Double Spend’ and another on ‘Digital Cash and privacy’. Until the arrival of Bitcoin he contributed to several cryptography mailing lists, and he is one of the founders and most influential figures of the Cypherpunk movement.

Hal Finney was always interested in and committed to matters of cryptography and privacy, but it was with the creation of the Cypherpunk mailing list that he began to share his thoughts on the subject more regularly and to focus fully on this field.

One of his most notable contributions at the beginning of the cypherpunk movement was the creation (together with Eric Hughes) of the first anonymous remailer. This remailer is called Type I and is known as the cypherpunk remailer, and it was used for the group’s mailing list.

“Sometimes people pay some price for being extremely intelligent, they are deficient in some emotional quality (…) Hal was not like that,” Philip Zimmerman told the New York Times about Hal Finney.

Hal Finney: Patient 128

On October 5, 2009, he published a letter titled ‘Dying outside’ in which he explained that he had ALS. Despite the disease, he never stopped programming nor set aside his work on Bitcoin. Hal Finney’s emotions and thoughts about his experience with Bitcoin were recorded for history in his well-known open letter: ‘Bitcoin and Me’, which was his last publication and also his farewell. 

Alcor – Admission of Hal Finney as Patient 128

“Hal Finney, Alcor member A-1436 who chose the whole-body option, was pronounced legally deceased on August 28, 2014, at 8:50 am at the age of 58 in Scottsdale, Arizona. That same day, Hal became Alcor’s 128th patient.”

“Hal paid for his cryopreservation through a combination of his life insurance and bitcoins donated by admirers. His wife, Fran, also has arrangements to be cryopreserved. She is happy to have the chance to see him again at some point in the future when they return in restored and rejuvenated bodies.”

He died on August 28, 2014, and was cryopreserved at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation. Hal Finney became patient number 128 at Alcor, where Ralph C. Merkle has been a director since 1998. Part of the funding for his cryogenic slumber was paid for through Bitcoin donations made by his admirers.