HomeCryptoBitcoinIt is unlikely that Hal Finney is Satoshi Nakamoto

It is unlikely that Hal Finney is Satoshi Nakamoto

Hal Finney is unlikely to be Satoshi Nakamoto. This is just my opinion of course, but I would like to bring up some conflicting elements.

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

This post was written on January 27th 2009, when Bitcoin had been launched a few weeks earlier.

So, Hal Finney, a could be Satoshi, after the launch of his creation, which he has been working on since 2008 if not earlier, is now concerned about CO2 emissions?

Satoshi also made assessments of Bitcoin’s future well beyond the time he himself would have lived in, but now he’s changing his mind?

Then, on July 29th, 2010, after Hal Finney’s message on Twitter, Satoshi wrote this message, more than a year later

“The current system where every user is a network node is not the intended configuration for large scale. That would be like every Usenet user runs their own NNTP server. The design supports letting users just be users.  The more burden it is to run a node, the fewer nodes there will be. Those few nodes will be big server farms.  The rest will be client nodes that only do transactions and don’t generate”.

Satoshi had already predicted that mining pools would be born (the first, Slush, arrived at the end of 2010), which he calls “big server farms”. It is worth noting that when Satoshi speaks of nodes he always refers to “miners”, in fact after the “non-generating” nodes he calls them “client nodes”. Nodes that would only do transactions without generating (mining).

I think there is too much contrast between these two views for them to be shared by the same person.

If not Hal Finney, who is Satoshi Nakamoto? 

Personally, I still consider Kleiman to be a more likely Satoshi (pointing out that I would avoid taking any of Craig Wright’s claims as true), or perhaps even Paul Le Roux (though more unlikely).

This is because they were both developers and/or experts on the Windows OS on which the first version of Bitcoin was released. Kleiman was also on the mailing list where Bitcoin was introduced in 2008.

Perhaps neither of the above is Satoshi, but from the evidence, I would more easily rule out Hal Finney as a possible candidate.

Hostfat
Hostfat
Engaged in the study and evolution of p2p technology since 1999/2000, he discovered Bitcoin in early 2010. He is the moderator of the Italian section on the bitcointalk.org forum.
RELATED ARTICLES

MOST POPULARS

GoldBrick