Hal Finney is Satoshi Nakamoto, the debate

Satoshi Nakamoto could be Hal Finney. This is the theory that has come back to prominence through a post on Reddit.

A user wonders again who is hiding behind the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto. 

“When you really think about it. The origin and early days of Bitcoin are really strange. You have this person who apparently creates an entirely new monetary system built from scratch except for some previous theoretical ideas. He has at best a small team and no funding or support from organizations, companies, or governments. Bitcoin grows purely by word of mouth and by volunteers organically. And in just ten years, it grows to be worth hundreds of billions of dollars and is beginning to disrupt the current monetary system. I find it hard to believe that governments don’t want to know who this guy is”.

Among the comments, some say that it’s obvious that governments want to know who Satoshi Nakamoto is and that’s why he remained anonymous.

For others he disappeared so he wouldn’t end up in jail, a risk he certainly would have taken with the US government, it is enough to see what happened to the founders of Silk Road. 

At this point the name of Hal Finney came back into the limelight. There are a lot of theories:

“One thing that makes me hesitate about thinking it’s Hal is that he was desperate for money at the end and said he sold his bitcoin. So either he didn’t have access to the 1m coins to sell for his medical expense or for some reason decided not to use them”.

One user recalled what was Hal Finney’s last post on Reddit: in it the computer programmer mentioned the beginnings of Bitcoin, the correspondence with Satoshi Nakamoto, the first 10-BTC transaction, and then, his fatal disease, which paralyzed him to death in 2014. 

So the conclusion of the Mcgillby user is the following: 

“According to this (his last post before he died) He left many of his bitcoins to his children. Hal Finney was a good man and very important to early bitcoin history. I don’t think he was Satoshi but in my opinion he was just as important”.

Certainly, many users agree that Satoshi may have died, but the mystery remains about the private keys that allow access to the first bitcoin mined, which are a billion-dollar fortune. 

Who is Hal Finney

Hal Finney, whose full name is Harold Thomas Finney, was a programmer for PGP Corporation and a collaborator of Phil Zimmermann. He was among the first to experiment with Bitcoin, so much so that in January 2009 he was already tweeting: 

Running bitcoin

— halfin (@halfin) January 11, 2009

He himself wrote on Reddit that he had taken part in the first transaction with Bitcoin, amounting to 10 BTC, and he had also mined Bitcoin initially. From the tweets, it is clear that he was also aware that one of Bitcoin’s biggest problems was the fact that it was not so anonymous after all. He was also aware that the energy consumed by Bitcoin was not good for the environment. 

Thinking about how to reduce CO2 emissions from a widespread Bitcoin implementation

— halfin (@halfin) January 27, 2009

The interesting thing about Hal Finney is that he lived close to Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto, who consistently denied being the inventor of Bitcoin. One fanciful theory is that Hal Finney would have been inspired by his neighbour. 

However, Hal Finney soon discovered that he was sick with ALS, which would lead him first to total paralysis and then to death in 2014. His body was put into a state of hibernation, with the hope that one day he will be able to be revived when the cure for his illness is found.