On January 10, 2009, a veteran cryptographer named Hal Finney downloaded the Bitcoin software and ran it on his computer. He was the first person other than Satoshi to run a Bitcoin node. Two days later, Satoshi sent him 10 BTC in what was the first Bitcoin transaction between two different users in history. Hal Finney is, quite literally, the second person in the Bitcoin story.
Finney was not a random recipient. He had spent his entire career working on cryptography and digital privacy. In the 1990s, he worked at PGP Corporation, helping to build the encryption software that would become the standard for secure email. He was one of the most active early contributors to the Cypherpunks mailing list. Long before Bitcoin, he had been thinking about how to build digital cash.
Finney’s enthusiastic response to the Bitcoin whitepaper was itself historic. “When Satoshi announced Bitcoin on the cryptography mailing list,” he later recalled, “he got a skeptical reception at best. Cryptographers have seen too many grand schemes by clueless newbies. They tend to have a knee-jerk reaction.” But Finney, reading the paper carefully, could see that this was different.
In 2010, Finney was diagnosed with ALS — amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. The progressive paralysis would eventually take away his ability to move, to speak, and finally to breathe. But it never took away his mind. As his body failed, Finney continued to write about Bitcoin. In 2013, he wrote a moving essay titled “Bitcoin and me,” describing his journey with both Bitcoin and his disease with grace and optimism.
Hal Finney died on August 28, 2014. Many in the crypto community believe that if anyone deserved to be remembered as Bitcoin’s co-founder in spirit, it was Hal. He brought cryptographic credibility to Satoshi’s wild idea at the exact moment it needed validation. Without Finney running that first remote node and receiving that first transaction, Bitcoin’s history would have started very differently.
Leave a Reply