Anyone who claims that Hal Finney was Satoshi Nakamoto should read the research done by James Lopp in which he proved that while Satoshi was active online Hal was on the other hand active in real life running races. Unless Hal had an associate who
Satoshi for him, this is very concrete evidence that Hal Finney was not Satoshi.
On Saturday April 18, 2009 at 8 AM Pacific time Hal Finney, an avid runner, began a 10 mile race in Santa Barbara, California. We can see his results here:
Source:
https://archive.is/46t9AWhy is this noteworthy? Because Satoshi was performing activities at the same time that Hal was running. For the hour and 18 minutes that Hal was running, we can be quite sure that he was not interacting with a computer.
It turns out that early Bitcoin developer Mike Hearn was emailing back and forth with Satoshi during this time. Hearn later published his emails on his web site; you can find a copy archived here.
We can see from the timestamps that Mike emailed Satoshi on Apr 18, 2009 at 3:08 PM and Satoshi replied at 6:16 PM. But what time zone was Mike's email client reporting? Well, Hearn conveniently included his IP address at the time (because one way of sending and receiving bitcoin back then was via direct connection to a peer node's IP address) and his address was 84.73.233.199. A quick lookup shows that this IP belongs to a Swiss ISP.
Source:
https://www.whois.com/whois/84.73.233.199This lines up with the well-established fact that Mike Hearn was working for Google at the time, out of their Zurich office. I additionally confirmed these details directly with Mike during my investigation.
What can we determine from all of this? Satoshi sent the email to Mike at 9:16 AM Pacific time - 2 minutes before Hal crossed the finish line.