[History]Hal Finney - Man Who made a huge contribution to the development of BTC
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Bitcointalk Profile Hal Finney: Hal
His famous topic on the forum: Bitcoin and me (Hal Finney)
Wikipedia: Hal Finney (computer scientist)
In this article I would like to share historical information about a man who in his years has done a lot for Bitcoin. And perhaps, without his participation, Bitcoin would not be as we know him today. I think it would be useful for people who are familiar with the history of Bitcoin to know what kind of person it was. So, here we go.
source: yap-helper.ru
Hal Finney was a famous cryptographer even before the advent of Bitcoin and in the early stages of the development of the cryptocurrency actively supported it, as he was a cypherpunk and a libertarian. It was he who became the recipient of the first bitcoin transaction from Satoshi Nakamoto. Hal actively worked on the bitcoin code and was so inspired by Satoshi's creation that a week after the creation of the genesis block of Bitcoin, on January 10, 2009, he suggested that in the future the price of the cryptocurrency could rise to $ 10 million.
Referring to Hal Finney's cypherpunk mailing list, Bitcoin v0.1 released, then there he writes:
Hal made this assumption a day before his famous tweet, in which he wrote about the launch of a bitcoin node. This tweet was the very first mention of cryptocurrency in social networks:
Subsequently, Hal quickly realized that Bitcoin did not provide sufficient privacy and wrote on January 21, 2010 that he was looking for ways to add anonymity functions to the cryptocurrency.
Let's plunge a little into the biography of Hal Finney and how his interests arose. Hal's real name is Harold Thomas Finney II. He was born on May 4, 1956 in the small town of Coalinga, California. In 1979, he graduated from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, where he showed himself in the hard sciences such as mathematics. At the same time, he was fond of programming. After graduation, Hal Finney joins Mattel (M Network) where he takes part in game development. Then he moved to PGP Corporation, where he worked until 2011.
By that time, he had already discovered the cypherpunk movement. One of the godfathers of cypherpunks was David Chaum, who at one time created the first prototype of digital money, eCash. Chaum's ideas were a source of inspiration for Finney. On his 1992 Cypherpunk mailing list Why Remailers I Hal написал:
Next, Finney was actively engaged in practical implementation A Cypherpunk's Manifesto, written by co-founder of the Eric Hughes movement.
As stated in this document:
And this is exactly what Finney was doing.
The result of Finney's work was a model for selecting encryption keys called: "trust network". In this model, a peer-to-peer guarantee from other users is used to identify a user's identity. Later, Zimmerman said:
Finney has also created a free email program that contains encryption tools. The program is called remailers. The program acted as a proxy server for ordinary mail, passing the information through a random third computer, than helped to confuse the traces. In the mailing list of ciphers Finney wrote so:
Let's go back to bitcoin. In his famous post on Bitcointalk, in March 2013, Hal recalls that when Satoshi Nakamoto announced the creation of Bitcoin in the cypherpunk mailing list, the reaction of the community was very low:
He downloaded the early Bitcoin code and became the first miner after Satoshi Nakamoto. In the absence of competition, he could mine 100 coins a day, even on his old computer, but since he was constantly overheating, Hal stopped mining.
During his early experiments with Bitcoin, Finney actively corresponded with Satoshi Nakamoto, reporting bugs and suggestions for fixing them. Finney was chosen by Satoshi Nakamoto to be the first recipient to transfer Bitcoin in the amount of 10 BTC.
In August of the same year, Finney learned about his terrible diagnosis - amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), which later led to paralysis, and then to death.
On Bitcointalk, Finney explained this in his post:
Before that, however, he managed to make a significant contribution to the development of Bitcoin. Finney created a piece of elliptical cryptocurrency software infrastructure that made transactions 20% faster. Work on improving the cryptocurrency continued even when Hal was completely ill. Having lost the ability to type, he used a special program that reacts to eye movements and in such a serious condition he was able to write a program bcflick. It was created to provide an extra layer of protection for bitcoin wallets.
Hal also thought about ways to avoid the negative impact of mining on the environment:
And even about taxes. In his post, he wrote:
Hal Finney = Satoshi Nakamato?
In March 2014, Newsweek published an article with the name of the alleged man hiding under the alias Satoshi Nakamoto: The Face Behind Bitcoin.
In this article, the creator of Bitcoin was named Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto, a U.S. citizen of Japanese descent. As it turned out, he did not even suspect the existence of cryptocurrency, and the annoyance of the press forced him to turn to the police. In this story, there was a very curious fact that forced the journalist Forbes, Andy Greenberg, to conduct his own investigation: Nakamoto's Neighbor: My Hunt For Bitcoin's Creator Led To A Paralyzed Crypto Genius.
This investigation led him to the house of the already paralyzed Finney. By an interesting coincidence, Dorian's house was in the same city as the last 10 years lived Hal. Their houses were a few minutes away from each other. Greenberg received information about this from an anonymous source a few hours after the Newsweek article was published.
Greenberg said that the investigation he had initiated indicated Finney's involvement in Bitcoin. Greenberg sent samples of Satoshi and Finney's letters to Juola & Associates for analysis. The analysis showed that Finney's speech features were as similar as possible to the other candidates as the Bitcoin whitepaper.
After the results of the analysis, chief researcher Juola & Associates John Knocker, wrote:
Later, the agency representatives admitted that the style of whitepaper Bitcoin is different from that of Finney. Finney himself, in an interview regarding his connection to the creation of Bitcoin, could only respond with the movement of his eyes:
Greenberg initially did believe that Finney was Satoshi Nakamoto, but after his investigation he concluded that Hal was telling the truth, denying his involvement in the creation of Bitcoin.
Despite this recognition, the speculation that Finney was the creator of Bitcoin continues to this day. For example, the 2019 post of Cryptpresso editor Randall Stevens, in which he lists the facts in favor of his theory: The Creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, Is Most Likely This Guy
Hal Finney with his wife Fran in 2013, source: Wired
Shortly before his death, Finney wrote in correspondence with Greensberg:
Hal Finney died August 28, 2014. He will forever remain in history as a man who made a huge contribution to the development of Bitcoin.
Sources:
- https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2436;sa=showPosts
- https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2009-January/015004.html
- https://101blockchains.com/who-is-hal-finney-bitcoin/
- https://twitter.com/halfin
- https://forklog.com/genezis-arhivy-hel-finni-chelovek-bez-kotorogo-ne-bylo-by-bitkoina/
- http://fennetic.net/irc/finney.org/~hal/why_rem1.html
- https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2014/03/25/satoshi-nakamotos-neighbor-the-bitcoin-ghostwriter-who-wasnt/#cd427514a37d
His famous topic on the forum: Bitcoin and me (Hal Finney)
Wikipedia: Hal Finney (computer scientist)
In this article I would like to share historical information about a man who in his years has done a lot for Bitcoin. And perhaps, without his participation, Bitcoin would not be as we know him today. I think it would be useful for people who are familiar with the history of Bitcoin to know what kind of person it was. So, here we go.
source: yap-helper.ru
Hal Finney was a famous cryptographer even before the advent of Bitcoin and in the early stages of the development of the cryptocurrency actively supported it, as he was a cypherpunk and a libertarian. It was he who became the recipient of the first bitcoin transaction from Satoshi Nakamoto. Hal actively worked on the bitcoin code and was so inspired by Satoshi's creation that a week after the creation of the genesis block of Bitcoin, on January 10, 2009, he suggested that in the future the price of the cryptocurrency could rise to $ 10 million.
Referring to Hal Finney's cypherpunk mailing list, Bitcoin v0.1 released, then there he writes:
Quote
As an amusing thought experiment, imagine that Bitcoin is successful and becomes the dominant payment system in use throughout the world. Then the total value of the currency should be equal to the total value of all the wealth in the world. Current estimates of total worldwide household wealth that I have found range from $100 trillion to $300 trillion. With 20 million coins, that gives each coin a value of about $10 million.
So the possibility of generating coins today with a few cents of compute time may be quite a good bet, with a payoff of something like 100 million to 1! Even if the odds of Bitcoin succeeding to this degree are slim, are they really 100 million to one against? Something to think about...
So the possibility of generating coins today with a few cents of compute time may be quite a good bet, with a payoff of something like 100 million to 1! Even if the odds of Bitcoin succeeding to this degree are slim, are they really 100 million to one against? Something to think about...
Hal made this assumption a day before his famous tweet, in which he wrote about the launch of a bitcoin node. This tweet was the very first mention of cryptocurrency in social networks:
Subsequently, Hal quickly realized that Bitcoin did not provide sufficient privacy and wrote on January 21, 2010 that he was looking for ways to add anonymity functions to the cryptocurrency.
Let's plunge a little into the biography of Hal Finney and how his interests arose. Hal's real name is Harold Thomas Finney II. He was born on May 4, 1956 in the small town of Coalinga, California. In 1979, he graduated from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, where he showed himself in the hard sciences such as mathematics. At the same time, he was fond of programming. After graduation, Hal Finney joins Mattel (M Network) where he takes part in game development. Then he moved to PGP Corporation, where he worked until 2011.
By that time, he had already discovered the cypherpunk movement. One of the godfathers of cypherpunks was David Chaum, who at one time created the first prototype of digital money, eCash. Chaum's ideas were a source of inspiration for Finney. On his 1992 Cypherpunk mailing list Why Remailers I Hal написал:
Quote
t seemed so obvious to me. Here we are faced with the problems of loss of privacy, creeping computerization, massive databases, more centralization - and Chaum offers a completely different direction to go in, one which puts power into the hands of individuals rather than governments and corporations. The computer can be used as a tool to liberate and protect people, rather than to control them.
Next, Finney was actively engaged in practical implementation A Cypherpunk's Manifesto, written by co-founder of the Eric Hughes movement.
As stated in this document:
Quote
Cypherpunks write code
And this is exactly what Finney was doing.
Quote
He himself initiated a meeting with Phil Zimmerman, the creator of Pretty Good Privacy, offering him his services, and worked on the PGP 2.0 version, which was the first major success in the field of "ideological" cryptography.
The result of Finney's work was a model for selecting encryption keys called: "trust network". In this model, a peer-to-peer guarantee from other users is used to identify a user's identity. Later, Zimmerman said:
Quote
"The trust model was a very complex part of the program and ensured phenomenal success of PGP. It's hard to overestimate Hal's contribution".
Finney has also created a free email program that contains encryption tools. The program is called remailers. The program acted as a proxy server for ordinary mail, passing the information through a random third computer, than helped to confuse the traces. In the mailing list of ciphers Finney wrote so:
Quote
"Two people can exchange emails while remaining completely anonymous".
Let's go back to bitcoin. In his famous post on Bitcointalk, in March 2013, Hal recalls that when Satoshi Nakamoto announced the creation of Bitcoin in the cypherpunk mailing list, the reaction of the community was very low:
I was more positive. I had long been interested in cryptographic payment schemes. Plus I was lucky enough to meet and extensively correspond with both Wei Dai and Nick Szabo, generally acknowledged to have created ideas that would be realized with Bitcoin. I had made an attempt to create my own proof of work based currency, called RPOW. So I found Bitcoin facinating.
He downloaded the early Bitcoin code and became the first miner after Satoshi Nakamoto. In the absence of competition, he could mine 100 coins a day, even on his old computer, but since he was constantly overheating, Hal stopped mining.
During his early experiments with Bitcoin, Finney actively corresponded with Satoshi Nakamoto, reporting bugs and suggestions for fixing them. Finney was chosen by Satoshi Nakamoto to be the first recipient to transfer Bitcoin in the amount of 10 BTC.
In August of the same year, Finney learned about his terrible diagnosis - amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), which later led to paralysis, and then to death.
On Bitcointalk, Finney explained this in his post:
My body began to fail. I slurred my speech, lost strength in my hands, and my legs were slow to recover. In August, 2009, I was given the diagnosis of ALS, also called Lou Gehrig's disease, after the famous baseball player who got it.
ALS is a disease that kills moter neurons, which carry signals from the brain to the muscles. It causes first weakness, then gradually increasing paralysis. It is usually fatal in 2 to 5 years. My symptoms were mild at first and I continued to work, but fatigue and voice problems forced me to retire in early 2011. Since then the disease has continued its inexorable progression.
ALS is a disease that kills moter neurons, which carry signals from the brain to the muscles. It causes first weakness, then gradually increasing paralysis. It is usually fatal in 2 to 5 years. My symptoms were mild at first and I continued to work, but fatigue and voice problems forced me to retire in early 2011. Since then the disease has continued its inexorable progression.
Before that, however, he managed to make a significant contribution to the development of Bitcoin. Finney created a piece of elliptical cryptocurrency software infrastructure that made transactions 20% faster. Work on improving the cryptocurrency continued even when Hal was completely ill. Having lost the ability to type, he used a special program that reacts to eye movements and in such a serious condition he was able to write a program bcflick. It was created to provide an extra layer of protection for bitcoin wallets.
Hal also thought about ways to avoid the negative impact of mining on the environment:
And even about taxes. In his post, he wrote:
I aquired most of my coins by mining. This has no anology with currency (unless you're counterfeiting 
) so I intend to treat bitcoins as precious metals and declare my profits as capital gains. Since I mined them more than a year earlier, they are long term capital gains. This is not as favorable as usual because it turns out that precious metals, even bullion, are considered "collectables" and taxed at a rate of 28%. Normal rate is 15%. If your overall tax rate is less than 28%, you can pay the lower rate. That is what I intend to do, based on my reading of the IRS documents.
) so I intend to treat bitcoins as precious metals and declare my profits as capital gains. Since I mined them more than a year earlier, they are long term capital gains. This is not as favorable as usual because it turns out that precious metals, even bullion, are considered "collectables" and taxed at a rate of 28%. Normal rate is 15%. If your overall tax rate is less than 28%, you can pay the lower rate. That is what I intend to do, based on my reading of the IRS documents. Hal Finney = Satoshi Nakamato?
In March 2014, Newsweek published an article with the name of the alleged man hiding under the alias Satoshi Nakamoto: The Face Behind Bitcoin.
In this article, the creator of Bitcoin was named Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto, a U.S. citizen of Japanese descent. As it turned out, he did not even suspect the existence of cryptocurrency, and the annoyance of the press forced him to turn to the police. In this story, there was a very curious fact that forced the journalist Forbes, Andy Greenberg, to conduct his own investigation: Nakamoto's Neighbor: My Hunt For Bitcoin's Creator Led To A Paralyzed Crypto Genius.
This investigation led him to the house of the already paralyzed Finney. By an interesting coincidence, Dorian's house was in the same city as the last 10 years lived Hal. Their houses were a few minutes away from each other. Greenberg received information about this from an anonymous source a few hours after the Newsweek article was published.
Greenberg said that the investigation he had initiated indicated Finney's involvement in Bitcoin. Greenberg sent samples of Satoshi and Finney's letters to Juola & Associates for analysis. The analysis showed that Finney's speech features were as similar as possible to the other candidates as the Bitcoin whitepaper.
After the results of the analysis, chief researcher Juola & Associates John Knocker, wrote:
Quote
"I think you found the real Satoshi Nakamoto."
Later, the agency representatives admitted that the style of whitepaper Bitcoin is different from that of Finney. Finney himself, in an interview regarding his connection to the creation of Bitcoin, could only respond with the movement of his eyes:
I've just asked him if he was involved in the creation of Bitcoin. The 57-year-old man's almost imperceptible eye movement is his only way of telling me that he was not, and that I've spent the last week caught in the same futile windmill-tilting that has ensnared so many other reporters trying to solve the puzzle of Bitcoin's mysterious creator known only as Satoshi Nakamoto.
Greenberg initially did believe that Finney was Satoshi Nakamoto, but after his investigation he concluded that Hal was telling the truth, denying his involvement in the creation of Bitcoin.
But in following the clues that led me to Finney, I found something equally significant: a dying man who had been something like a far-more-brilliant Forrest Gump of cryptographic history: a witness to and participant in practically every important moment in the recent history of secret-keeping technologies. From the development of the first widely used strong encryption software known as PGP, to early anonymity systems, to the first Bitcoin transaction, Finney was there.
Despite this recognition, the speculation that Finney was the creator of Bitcoin continues to this day. For example, the 2019 post of Cryptpresso editor Randall Stevens, in which he lists the facts in favor of his theory: The Creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, Is Most Likely This Guy
Hal Finney with his wife Fran in 2013, source: Wired
Shortly before his death, Finney wrote in correspondence with Greensberg:
Quote
"Most of all I am proud of my work on PGP, although I would not be surprised if my modest contribution to bitcoin, especially the optimization of its mathematics, will remain the main and most lasting legacy of my work."
Hal Finney died August 28, 2014. He will forever remain in history as a man who made a huge contribution to the development of Bitcoin.
Sources:
- https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2436;sa=showPosts
- https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2009-January/015004.html
- https://101blockchains.com/who-is-hal-finney-bitcoin/
- https://twitter.com/halfin
- https://forklog.com/genezis-arhivy-hel-finni-chelovek-bez-kotorogo-ne-bylo-by-bitkoina/
- http://fennetic.net/irc/finney.org/~hal/why_rem1.html
- https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2014/03/25/satoshi-nakamotos-neighbor-the-bitcoin-ghostwriter-who-wasnt/#cd427514a37d