Hal Finney

His full name was Harold Thomas Finney II. He was born on May 4, 1956, in Coalinga, CaliforniaCaliforniaCalifornia is a U.S. state on the Pacific coast; its capital is Sacramento and its largest city is Los Angeles. California was admitted to the Union on September 9, 1850, as the 31st state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 39,538,223, the largest of any state.Open the full entry.⁠[1][2][3]

The obituary printed in The Santa Barbara Independent states that he was interested in science and mathematics from early childhood; he had a brother, Mike, and two sisters, Kathy and Pat.⁠[1][2]

He grew up in Arcadia, a suburb of Los Angeles, and attended Arcadia High School; a ForbesForbesForbes is an American business media brand that began with Forbes magazine, founded by B.C. Forbes in 1917. It is known for rankings such as the Forbes 400, the World’s Billionaires list and 30 Under 30, and operates Forbes.com, ForbesLive events and licensed editions in 81 countries. Since 2014 a majority stake has been held by the Hong Kong investment group Integrated Whale Media; a 2021 plan to list on the New York Stock Exchange through a special purpose acquisition company was terminated in 2022. It is headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey.Open the full entry article of 2014 states that friends remembered him as very intelligent and that in 1974, his senior year, his peers voted him “most brains.”⁠[4]

The Human Rights Foundation’s profile states that in high school he volunteered to help manage student records just so that he could work with a computer.⁠[3]

He went on to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he met his future wife, Fran. The Forbes article states that he switched there from mathematics to computers; the Human Rights Foundation’s profile states that he was known for discussing the merits of free markets with his fellow students.⁠[4][3][1][5]

In an interview with Scott Stilphen looking back on his years in game development he said that he was supposed to graduate in 1978 but was a few units short, so he took the remaining classes during his first year of work and graduated in 1979; the interview is carried by Atari Compendium, where the byline is marked 2006. The obituary states that he graduated in 1979 with a degree in engineering.⁠[6][1]

The obituary states that he and Fran married in 1979; Noozhawk wrote in 2010 that the two married right after graduation.⁠[1][5]

In the interview he said that APh hired him full time in the summer of 1978 and that he went on working there until about 1986; he thought that he had been hired by Glenn Hightower, then a co-owner and the main manager of APh, and that Dave Rolfe, whom he knew well and who already worked there, had put in a good word for him.⁠[6]

The introduction to the interview states that APh, which it calls APh Technology Consultants, was a Pasadena firm that Mattel hired in 1976 to help design what became the Intellivision system, and that it eventually programmed the system’s software, most of the development tools and all of the first Intellivision, M Network and Keyboard Component games; it states that the firm’s programmers were Caltech graduates and names Glenn Hightower as APh’s president. The Forbes article, for its part, says that after graduating he took a job writing video games for Mattel.⁠[6][4]

He said that he spent his first year or so at APh on cash-register software, not on games. His first contribution to a game was sound effects: he tried to make the chip talk, which did not work very well, and the result ended up as the “Yer out!” sound in the Intellivision game Major League BaseballMLBMajor League Baseball (MLB) is a baseball league comprising 30 clubs in the United States and Canada.Open the full entry.⁠[6]

By his account he was free to work on a game about a year later, beginning with Space Battle for the Intellivision; he did most of the next one, Star Strike, on his own, using a random-number generator to shake the screen when the station is destroyed and adding a small loop that kept incrementing video-memory locations as a hidden Easter egg.⁠[6]

He said that he turned out the M Network games for the Atari VCS/2600 in a few weeks each and could no longer recall exactly which ones he had worked on; he called Dark Cavern “one of my more successful porting efforts” and said that he tuned its programming for the 2600 controller. The table of games on the page lists under his name five Atari VCS/2600 titles (Adventures of TRON, Armor Ambush, Astroblast, Dark Cavern and Space Attack), two Intellivision titles (Space Battle and Star Strike) and two unreleased Intellivision ECS prototypes (Conversational French and Jack LaLanne’s Physical Conditioning).⁠[6]

He worked for months on Jack LaLanne’s Physical Conditioning and met Jack LaLanne, who came to the sound studio to record motivational tracks; the musician Robert Randall wrote original compositions for the project and Dave Rolfe wrote a new sound-programming language for it. He also spent weeks trying to lip-sync the character “Mimi” in Conversational French to recorded French conversations.⁠[6]

In the interview he listed what he had done at APh: two Intellivision games, half a dozen VCS games, work on the Keyboard Component, cash-register software, a spectrometer for Bausch and Lomb, and camera-control software for a Hollywood special-effects house. He said that he never thought of himself primarily as a games programmer but as “more of a general purpose Assembly language developer.”⁠[6]

The Forbes article states that the Finneys moved into a house in Temple City in 1982 and that he lived in that neighborhood for nine years; the article puts the house less than two miles from the home of Dorian Nakamoto’s family.⁠[4]

The obituary states that in 1991 he and Fran moved with their two children, Jason and Erin, to Santa Barbara, where he ran with his dogs along the coast and the trails; Noozhawk’s account is that the two moved to the Santa Barbara area in the early 1990s, and its 2010 article names the Noleta area.⁠[1][5][2]

The Human Rights Foundation’s profile states that he got an internet connection in the early 1990s; the Forbes article states that he discovered the Cypherpunks in 1991.⁠[3][4]

The Forbes article states that he contacted Phil ZimmermannPhil ZimmermannPhil Zimmermann (born 1954) is a software engineer and cryptographer, the author of the email encryption software PGP (Pretty Good Privacy); he later developed the VoIP encryption protocol ZRTP and co-founded the encrypted-communications company Silent Circle.Open the full entry, the author of PGP, became an early collaborator on PGP 2.0, put almost a full-time job’s worth of hours into developing it, and pioneered its “web of trust” model. The article says that his role was played down in public at the time; he himself stated to its author that he had coded “the bulk of the changes” from PGP 1.0 to 2.0.⁠[4]

He himself wrote in 2013 that he got his start in cryptography by working closely with Phil Zimmermann on an early version of PGP. Noozhawk wrote that he first wrote this code for free because he believed in the cause, and that cryptography attracted him as a match for his technical skills and for its political implications, which interested him. The article quotes the remark that “PGP crypto software is used by freedom fighters and journalists all over the world when they go into a Third World country.” CoinDeskCoinDeskCoinDesk is a cryptocurrency media, events, index, and data company founded in 2013 and headquartered in New York. Its businesses include the CoinDesk news website, the annual crypto industry conference Consensus, and the CoinDesk Indices index business. In November 2023, the digital asset exchange Bullish acquired CoinDesk from Digital Currency Group, and CoinDesk has since operated as an independent subsidiary of Bullish.Open the full entry calls him the second developer on PGP after Zimmermann.⁠[7][5][8]

He wrote that he was active in the Cypherpunks and ran the first cryptographically based anonymous remailer; the Forbes article states that he was the first to integrate PGP into remailers. The Human Rights Foundation’s profile states that he took part in the “crypto wars” of the 1990s.⁠[7][4][3]

The Human Rights Foundation’s profile states that he worried that electronic payments would erode privacy, and it quotes a message of his to the Cypherpunks mailing list that takes as its example the records left when he orders something by telephone or electronically with his VisaVisaVisa Inc. is one of the world’s leaders in digital payments, with roots going back to 1958, and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.Open the full entry card; the link attached to the quotation points to the list archive for August 1993. The profile states that he admired DigiCashDigiCashDigiCash was an electronic cash company founded in Amsterdam by the cryptographer David Chaum. It developed eCash, a payment system that used blind signatures to protect payers’ privacy, and licensed it to banks in several countries for trials; it moved its headquarters to Silicon Valley in 1997, filed for bankruptcy protection in November 1998, and its software and patents later passed to eCash Technologies.Open the full entry, the startup led by the cryptographer David ChaumDavid ChaumDavid Chaum is a cryptographer who introduced mix networks, blind signatures and the electronic cash system eCash, initiated the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) and founded DigiCash in Amsterdam; he later developed voter-verifiable voting systems and leads the blockchain project xx network.Open the full entry that had set out in 1990 to create a form of digital cash.⁠[3]

CoinDesk states that he was a long-time member of the Extropy Institute, an organization devoted to transhumanism and life extension.⁠[8]

In the interview he said that he had started working on the freeware PGP encryption program about ten years earlier with its author, Phil Zimmermann; that Zimmermann hired him when he started PGP, Inc. in 1996; and that the company was acquired a couple of years later by Network Associates, where he had been ever since, working on cryptographic software.⁠[6]

In his 2013 post he wrote: “When Phil decided to start PGP Corporation, I was one of the first hires.” He wrote that he worked on PGP until his retirement. An ALS Network article describes him as the first employee the company hired.⁠[7][9]

On August 15, 2004, he announced in an email his new hashcash-based server, rpow.net, and invited list members to try it out; R. A. Hettinga forwarded the message to the Cryptography mailing list the same day.⁠[10]

As he explained it, the server accepts hashcash as a proof-of-work (POW) token and issues in exchange RSA-signed Reusable Proof of Work (RPOW) tokens. RPOW tokens can pass from person to person, each transfer exchanging the old token for a new one; each token can be used only once, but because it always gives rise to a successor the effect is as if one token were being handed on. RPOWs can be created only from POWs or RPOWs of equal value, so they are as scarce as the hashcash behind them and yet, unlike hashcash, reusable.⁠[10]

He wrote that what was new in the system was its security model: the server software runs on an IBMIBMIBM (International Business Machines Corporation) is an American information technology company, renamed in 1924 from the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (C-T-R).Open the full entry 4758 Secure Cryptographic Coprocessor validated to FIPS 140 level 4, a card that can produce a signed attestation of its own software configuration, which users can check against the published source code to confirm that it contains no back doors. The source code could be downloaded from rpow.net; he explained that the system was in early beta and that fixing problems might require reloading the server code, which would invalidate existing tokens, so people should not hoard them yet.⁠[10]

CoinDesk calls RPOW computing’s first reusable proof-of-work system, based on Adam BackAdam BackAdam Back is a British cryptographer and computer scientist, the inventor of the proof-of-work system Hashcash, and a co-founder and the chief executive of the Bitcoin technology company Blockstream.Open the full entry’s Hashcash and developed with the aim of implementing it in a digital currency system. He himself wrote in 2013: “I had made an attempt to create my own proof of work based currency, called RPOW.” The Human Rights Foundation’s profile states that RPOW never really took off.⁠[8][7][3]

On November 7, 2008, he joined the discussion on the Cryptography mailing list of Satoshi Nakamoto’s paper on Bitcoin, opening his reply with the words “Bitcoin seems to be a very promising idea.” He wrote that he liked the idea of basing security on the assumption that the CPU power of honest participants outweighs that of an attacker, and that he saw value in an unforgeable token whose production rate is predictable, which he thought more like gold than like fiat currency; he pointed to Nick SzaboNick SzaboNick Szabo is an American computer scientist, legal scholar and cryptographer who developed the term and concept of smart contracts and in 1998 conceived bit gold, a design for digital money often described as a precursor of Bitcoin; he has repeatedly denied being Satoshi Nakamoto, and in January 2025 he became chief scientist of JAN3.Open the full entry’s earlier “bit gold” concept and noted that anonymous payment schemes could be layered on top of Bitcoin.⁠[11]

In the same message he said that he had trouble fully understanding the system, because the paper did not spell out the rules that participants must follow. He asked a series of questions: how a transaction that does not reach every node is handled; whether a node tracking several chains checks for double-spending across them; how a more powerful attacker could erase or add old transactions in the chain; how far back through a coin’s history of transfers a recipient needs to check; and whether timestamp nodes check that each coin’s previous transaction is in the chain. He suggested a more process-oriented description with concrete data structures for coins, blocks, transactions and messages.⁠[11]

On November 13, replying to James A. Donald, he wrote that Satoshi had suggested that releasing source code might be the best way to clarify the design, and that he had found a SourceForge project set up for bitgold that did not yet have any code. He wrote that nodes need to maintain several candidate block chains at once and that a shorter chain can be deleted once it has fallen far enough behind; on the motivation of node operators, he wrote that if a small group of operators cannot cheat, the long tail of operators is large enough and the system is socially useful, “simple altruism can suffice to keep the network running properly.” In his view Bitcoin was two independent ideas: a way of building a decentralized, globally consistent database, and a way of using it for a system similar to Wei DaiWei DaiWei Dai is a computer engineer and the original author of the open-source cryptography library Crypto++. In 1998 he proposed b-money, a scheme for anonymous digital money that the Bitcoin paper lists as its first reference, and the smallest unit of ether, the wei, is named after him. He also writes on LessWrong about decision theory and AI safety, and proposed the decision theory that came to be called Updateless Decision Theory.Open the full entry’s b-money but based on transactions and coins, not accounts; he considered the database the harder part, and wrote: “The use of proof-of-work as a tool for this purpose is a novel idea well worth further review IMO.”⁠[12]

He recalled in 2013 that when Satoshi announced Bitcoin on the cryptography mailing list the reception was skeptical at best; he wrote that cryptographers tend to be quick to dismiss schemes put forward by newcomers, whereas he had long studied cryptographic payment schemes and had been lucky enough to meet and correspond extensively with both Wei Dai and Nick Szabo, so that he was more positive. CoinDesk states that, after other cryptographers had voiced doubts, he was the first to enter the conversation in support of the idea. The Human Rights Foundation’s profile states that Satoshi gave him early access to the source code and that he began to review it.⁠[7][8][3]

The Human Rights Foundation’s profile states that Satoshi issued the first version of the Bitcoin software on January 8, 2009. On January 10 he congratulated Satoshi on the Cryptography mailing list on the first alpha release and said that he was looking forward to trying it out.⁠[3][13]

In that message he took up the cap of 21 million coins that Satoshi had announced and offered a thought experiment: if Bitcoin became the dominant payment system in use throughout the world, the total value of the currency should equal the total value of all the wealth in the world; the estimates of total worldwide household wealth that he cited ranged from $100 trillion to $300 trillion, which with 20 million coins gives each coin a value of about $10 million. From this he wrote: “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!” The message closes: “Something to think about...”⁠[13]

The same day he posted from his Twitter account, @halfin: “Running bitcoin.” The Human Rights Foundation’s profile calls this the first post about Bitcoin on that platform, and states that the software he had started promptly connected with two peers, both quite possibly run by Satoshi, that his node soon crashed, and that over the next day or two he and Satoshi pinpointed the problem. ALS Network wrote in January 2023 that the post had drawn more than 68,000 likes, 22,000 retweets and over 7,570 quote tweets.⁠[9][14][3]

He wrote in 2013 that he thought he was the first person besides Satoshi to run Bitcoin: “I mined block 70-something, and I was the recipient of the first bitcoin transaction”; Satoshi sent him ten coins as a test. As to the date of that transfer, the Forbes article, going by the transaction record in his wallet, gives January 11, 2009, and the Human Rights Foundation’s profile gives January 12; ALS Network and Bitcoin Magazine put it two days after his post, with the transaction included in block 170.⁠[7][4][3][9][14]

By his account he and Satoshi exchanged emails over the next few days, mostly with him reporting bugs and Satoshi fixing them; the Forbes article states that the surviving Gmail conversation from January 2009 comes to about fifteen emails. He wrote that at the time he thought he was dealing with a young man of Japanese ancestry who was very smart and sincere. CoinDesk states that he went on helping with the early Bitcoin code through the Bitcoin Talk forum.⁠[7][4][8]

He wrote that once the software had run stably for a few days he simply left it running; the difficulty was 1 then, and blocks could be found with a CPU. He mined several blocks and later turned the software off because it made his computer run hot and the fan noise bothered him; in retrospect, he wrote, he wished he had kept it running longer. The Forbes article states that at times he mined up to about a hundred coins a day, and gives his wife Fran’s view of it at the time: “I thought it was just an altruistic thing he was doing for a friend.”⁠[7][4]

On January 24 he answered on the mailing list Jonathan Thornburg’s view that no major government would allow Bitcoin to operate on a large scale. He wrote that Bitcoin’s advantage was that it is distributed, with no single point of failure, no mint, and no company whose officers could be subpoenaed, arrested and shut down: “It is more like a P2P network.” He added that Bitcoin could operate in a less anonymous mode, with transfers tied to individuals instead of single-use keys, and that a large decentralized payment system would still be useful. He considered “the key new idea, a decentralized, global, irreversible transaction database,” to be something that could be separated from Bitcoin and put to other uses. He also explained that proof-of-work serves mainly to protect the integrity of the transaction history and that creating new coins through proof-of-work was a temporary measure that the software would phase out over several years. On the botnets that Thornburg had raised, he wrote that if proof-of-work tokens became valuable money, owners would expect their idle machines to be earning for them, would be more likely to notice when a botnet was stealing those earnings, and would maintain their computers more carefully; he acknowledged that reasoning of this kind quickly turns into unreliable speculation.⁠[15]

Jameson LoppJameson LoppJameson Lopp is a Bitcoin software engineer and security researcher who is co-founder and chief security officer of the self-custody company Casa. He built the Bitcoin node statistics project Statoshi, ran nodes at BitGo and joined Casa in 2018; in recent years he has focused on the quantum computing threat to Bitcoin and is one of the authors of the migration proposal BIP-361.Open the full entry’s 2023 article mentions a post of January 27, 2009, from the @halfin account about thinking how to reduce the CO2 emissions of a widespread Bitcoin implementation; the Human Rights Foundation’s profile credits him with early insights into Bitcoin’s limit of 21 million coins, scaling through payment layers, overlay protocols, transaction privacy, reducing the CO2 emissions of mining, and why copycat projects were unlikely to displace Bitcoin.⁠[16][3]

He wrote that early 2009 found him in the best shape of his life: he had lost weight, taken up distance running, completed several half marathons, and was training for a full marathon. Jameson Lopp’s article states that on Saturday, April 18, 2009, at 8 a.m. Pacific time he started a 10-mile race in Santa Barbara, which he ran in an hour and 18 minutes.⁠[7][16]

After that his health declined: his speech became slurred, his hands grew weak, and his legs were slow to recover; the Forbes article’s account is that he began to tire quickly, slur his words, feel a strange tingling and lose coordination in his right hand. In August 2009 he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, also called Lou Gehrig’s disease); Bitcoin Magazine gives the date of the diagnosis as August 5, 2009. Noozhawk wrote that he was 53 at the time and that the diagnosis came a week after the couple’s 30th wedding anniversary; a year and a half earlier he had not known what ALS was, the doctors had mentioned ALS as the worst-case possibility while working toward a diagnosis, and when he asked Fran what it was she answered that it was really bad, something no one would want to have. The Human Rights Foundation’s profile states that in 2009 Fran began to notice that he was slurring his speech.⁠[7][4][14][5][3]

On October 5, 2009, he made the diagnosis public in an essay on the website LessWrong, “Dying Outside,” which opens with a joke about a doctor giving a patient a fatal diagnosis. He wrote that ALS damages the nerves, progressively weakens and paralyzes the muscles, and in the end stops a person’s breathing, a process that generally takes about 2 to 5 years. He named two bright spots: the disease usually spares the higher functions of the brain, and it is “mostly fatal,” not always fatal, since a patient whose breathing fails can choose a tracheotomy and mechanical ventilation. He wrote that he had been surprised to learn that more than 90 percent of patients choose to die, although mechanical respiration can extend survival indefinitely and the great majority of people living on respirators describe their quality of life as good; and he wrote: “ALS takes away your body, but it does not take away your mind.”⁠[17]

He wrote that the main obstacles to choosing ventilation are the heavy load on caregivers and the practical and financial difficulties, and that much of the resistance is really philosophical: people dislike the idea of a life dependent on machines and are poor predictors of how they will react to changed circumstances. He wrote: “I hope that when the time comes, I will choose life.” He mentioned Stephen Hawking, who was said to be able to type ten words a minute by twitching a cheek muscle, and said that he hoped to be able to go on reading, browsing the web and taking part in conversations by email and messaging; he was making use of a free service for ALS patients that would create a synthetic model of his own voice, and his dream was to contribute to open-source software projects even from within an immobile body. The essay ends: “That will be a life very much worth living.”⁠[17]

In the comments under the essay he answered a reader: “I am indeed signed up, having been an Alcor client for 20 years.” In another comment, on cryonics, he wrote that “it helps tremendously to have reasons for hope, and cryonics provides another avenue for a possibly favorable outcome.”⁠[17]

At the time of the diagnosis he was training to run a qualifying time for the Boston Marathon, which he had hoped to achieve at the Santa Barbara marathon; within a few months he could no longer run. Noozhawk wrote that at the 2009 Santa Barbara International Marathon he walked the last two miles with the help of a cane, with Fran at his side and the other members of the South Coast Fights ALS team around them, and that the two crossed the finish line hand in hand. The fundraiser tied to the marathon was Fran’s idea; it raised money for the local ALS research of the Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA) and became an annual tradition, and the couple also joined the MDA’s local support group.⁠[5][2]

Jameson Lopp’s article quotes a post that his wife published on LessWrong: he attended the Singularity Summit in San Francisco on August 14–15, 2010, and a few days later she wrote that his weekly running, 50 to 60 miles a week in February 2009, had stopped being possible in November 2009, that his typing had gone from a “rapid-fire” 120 words a minute to a slow finger peck, and that inside he was “the same brilliant guy I have known for well over half of my life.”⁠[16]

Noozhawk wrote on October 17, 2010, that his speech was slower and hoarser than a year earlier and that walking even a few steps had become extremely difficult, though he could still get in and out of his wheelchair and the car. He was still a developer for PGP Corp. and went on working, getting around the house in his motorized wheelchair or taking the bus to do research at UCSB; because some of his fingers no longer cooperated, his very fast typing had slowed, and the article shows him tapping on his iPad. The article describes him as one of the first people to work with encryption software and states that he received a lifetime achievement award that year for his work on email encryption.⁠[5]

The article states that Fran worked a few hours a day as a physical therapist and managed his medical care, that their daughter, Erin, lived in Denver, and that their son, Jason, lived with them and helped around the house. The family had remodeled their home, adding a large roll-in shower and a large closet. The couple still went out on runs together, with Fran running and pushing his wheelchair along the bike paths near their home. On a December ski trip his former skill carried him gracefully down the beginner slopes, while getting on and off the lifts was much harder. He said that he missed walking and running but that the wheelchair let him get around well, and that the hardest part was daily self-care, with simple tasks such as dressing taking a long time. He felt bad that Fran had taken on the extra work; she called it “hugely worth it.”⁠[5]

He said that losing capabilities as time goes on is hard but has to be accepted; there are last times for many things, one is not always aware which time will be the last, and when one does know, one can say goodbye in one’s mind while enjoying it. The couple were raising money again that year, at the Santa Barbara International Marathon of November 6, 2010, at which he was to cross the finish line in a wheelchair. Fran said that the hardest thing for her had been accepting that the future she had imagined with him would not happen; she said: “If he’s there, it’s a really good future.”⁠[5]

He wrote that the next he heard of Bitcoin was in late 2010, when he was surprised to find that it was not only still going but that bitcoins actually had monetary value; he dusted off his old wallet, found that his coins were still there, and later moved them into an offline wallet, where he hoped they would be worth something to his heirs. The Forbes article states that he was relieved to rediscover the coins in 2010, still intact. Blockworks writes that he is said to have learned of his condition in 2009 and then decided to move away from the project.⁠[7][4][18]

On December 30, 2010, in the “Bitcoin Bank” thread on the Bitcoin Forum, he wrote that there is a very good reason for Bitcoin-backed banks to exist, issuing their own digital cash redeemable for bitcoins. He wrote: “Bitcoin itself cannot scale to have every single financial transaction in the world be broadcast to everyone and included in the block chain.” A secondary level of payment systems, lighter in weight and more efficient, was therefore needed. He pointed to the theory of competitive free banking that George Selgin had worked out in detail and predicted that Bitcoin’s long-term role would be that of “high-powered money,” a reserve currency for banks issuing their own digital cash, with most Bitcoin transactions then taking place between banks to settle net transfers.⁠[19]

He wrote that his symptoms were mild at first and that he continued to work, but that fatigue and voice problems forced him to retire in early 2011.⁠[7][8]

On March 17, 2013, he announced bcflick on the Bitcoin Forum: a patched version of bitcoind/bitcoin-qt, for Linux only, built on the Flicker software by Jon McCune and following up Mike HearnMike HearnMike Hearn is a software engineer and former Google employee who became a Bitcoin developer and co-developed Bitcoin XT, which sought to raise the block size limit; he announced his exit from Bitcoin development in January 2016 and was lead engineer at the blockchain company R3, where he built the distributed ledger platform Corda.Open the full entry’s post introducing trusted computing. As he explained it, the module named bcflick runs only briefly in the processor’s secure mode, and the TPM chip protects its data by sealing it to the hash of that code; only bcflick holds the wallet’s encryption key, so that generating keys and signing transactions must go through it, and it reads the time from the TPM, keeps track of the day’s spending and refuses transactions that would exceed a daily limit, so that malware could drain a wallet only slowly. He wrote that only certain IntelIntelIntel is a semiconductor company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, founded by Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore in 1968; it introduced the 4004 microprocessor in 1971, its x86 processors have long powered personal computers, it has pursued a foundry strategy since 2021, and Lip-Bu Tan has been its chief executive officer since 2025.Open the full entry and AMDAMDAMD (Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.) is a publicly traded U.S. semiconductor company founded in 1969 and headquartered in Santa Clara, California; its stock trades on Nasdaq under the ticker AMD. The company develops CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, adaptive systems-on-chip and related software, mainly for the data center, personal computer, gaming and embedded markets; its product brands include Ryzen, EPYC, Radeon and Instinct.Open the full entry processors support the secure mode required; his flicker branch was kept in the halfinney/bitcoin repository on GitHub.⁠[20]

On March 19 he published “Bitcoin and me” on the same forum, looking back over the previous four years. He wrote that by then he was essentially paralyzed, was fed through a tube and had his breathing assisted through another, and operated his computer with a commercial eye-tracker system whose speech synthesizer had become his voice; he spent his days in a power wheelchair and had built an Arduino-based interface that let him adjust the wheelchair’s position with his eyes.⁠[7]

He wrote that life was not too bad: he could still read, listen to music and watch television and films, and he had recently found that he could still write code. “It’s very slow, probably 50 times slower than I was before.” But it gave him goals. What he was working on was a project suggested by Mike Hearn, using the security features that modern processors provide for “Trusted Computing” to harden Bitcoin wallets, and only the documentation remained to be finished.⁠[7]

Of the swings in the price of Bitcoin he wrote that he had “skin in the game” but had come by his coins through luck, and that having lived through the crash of 2011 his attitude was “Easy come, easy go.” He wrote that his bitcoins were stored in a safe deposit box and that his son and daughter, both tech-savvy, should be able to deal with them; the Forbes article states that the coins were transferred to a disc, which was later stored in a safety deposit box at the family’s bank. The post ends: “I’m comfortable with my legacy.”⁠[7][4]

The Forbes article states that as his medical bills mounted he sold the majority of his coins at an exchange rate of around $100; CoinDesk’s account is that in 2013, after the price had passed $100 a coin, he sold many of them to pay medical bills. Fran said of this: “It’s fine with me if it means we have enough money to keep Hal alive, at home and comfortable.”⁠[4][8]

In an article published on March 25, 2014, the Forbes journalist Andy Greenberg wrote that after Newsweek’s cover story, released on March 6, claimed that Dorian Nakamoto had invented Bitcoin, he received an anonymous email pointing out that Hal Finney had lived for almost a decade in Temple City, only a few blocks, the email said, from the Nakamoto family home. The article mentions two conjectures: one, which an unnamed Bitcoin podcaster put to him at the Texas Bitcoin Conference, was that Finney had invented Bitcoin himself and simply used his neighbor’s name as a pseudonym; the other, which Greenberg wrote that he himself began to believe, was that Finney had been the ghostwriter for Bitcoin’s creator.⁠[4]

Greenberg emailed him a few times. In his reply he wrote: “I’m flattered but I deny categorically these allegations.” And again: “Again, I categorically deny any familiarity with Dorian Nakamoto.” The article states that Dorian Nakamoto was seven years older than he was and that the two never attended the same school; Dorian Nakamoto denied any involvement with Bitcoin and let the article’s author know through his brother Tokuo that he had never heard Finney’s name.⁠[4]

Greenberg telephoned Fran, who relayed his questions to her husband; he confirmed that he had corresponded with Bitcoin’s creator but denied any connection with the invention of Bitcoin or with Dorian Nakamoto. Fran said on the telephone: “For all Hal knew, Satoshi Nakamoto could have been next door, or he could have been in Japan.”⁠[4]

A week later, on a Saturday afternoon, Greenberg visited him at his home in Santa Barbara. With his eye movements he spent about ten minutes writing his first sentence to the visitor, which his voice software spoke: “Andy, it’s hard to time the drive from LA.” The article states that he was then 57, that his muscles no longer obeyed him, and that his eyes, among the few parts of his body still under his control, were deteriorating as well; Fran, his full-time caregiver, said that he was on ventilator support 24 hours a day and had difficulty communicating, that “He’s very fragile,” and that it would be nice if people would not harass him. Asked whether he had been involved in creating Bitcoin, he signaled with an almost imperceptible movement of his eyes that he had not.⁠[4]

His son, Jason, showed Greenberg the emails of January 2009 and the record in the wallet of the receipt of Satoshi’s ten-bitcoin test transaction. Jason said: “My father is an honest guy,” and went on: “He would have loved to have been part of creating Bitcoin, and he wouldn’t have hidden it. But he wasn’t involved.” The article states that the stylometry firm Juola & Associates, which had earlier found a total mismatch between Dorian Nakamoto’s writing and Satoshi’s, then found that the newly shown Satoshi emails matched the style of the Bitcoin white paper more closely than Finney’s own writing did, and far more closely than Dorian Nakamoto’s.⁠[4]

Greenberg’s conclusion was that the connections were coincidental and that Finney was telling the truth in saying that he had not invented Bitcoin; at the same time he wrote that “there’s no question that Finney did in fact help to create it.” The article states that Finney raised his eyes and eyebrows to say yes: asked whether he considered himself a creator of Bitcoin in the open-source sense, he raised his eyes and eyebrows, and asked whether he was proud of that work, he raised his eyes again and smiled. Jason explained to Greenberg that involuntary movements are less affected by ALS than voluntary ones.⁠[4]

The article quotes Phil Zimmermann’s judgment of him: “Hal is a rare genius who never had to trade his emotional intelligence to get his intellectual gifts.” Finney himself wrote in an email to Greenberg: “I am most proud of my work on PGP.”⁠[4]

CoinDesk states that he had expressed a wish to be cryopreserved at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation’s facility in Scottsdale, ArizonaArizonaArizona is a state in the southwestern United States; its capital and largest city is Phoenix. Arizona was admitted to the Union on February 14, 1912, as the 48th state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 7,151,502.Open the full entry.⁠[8]

The Santa Barbara Independent’s obituary states that he died on August 28, 2014, at the age of 58.⁠[1]

Accounts of the place of death differ: the Human Rights Foundation’s profile gives Phoenix, Arizona, and the data box of The Santa Barbara Independent’s obituary enters Santa Barbara as the city of death. Noozhawk wrote in September 2014 that his body was to be cryogenically frozen in an Arizona facility, in keeping with his wishes. Decrypt wrote in August 2024 that he died of complications of ALS and that his body was cryopreserved by Alcor, based in Scottsdale; James Arrowood, Alcor’s president and chief executive, said that Alcor does not hold cryptocurrency because of the volatility of such assets but accepts Bitcoin donations, some of them from Finney’s admirers, and converts them to fiat currency. Decrypt adds that on the day he died the price of Bitcoin was $510.⁠[3][1][2][21]

The Santa Barbara Independent printed its obituary on September 2, stating that he had been married to Fran for 35 years and that a memorial celebration of his life would be held at a later date; in lieu of flowers the family asked for donations to Hospice of Santa Barbara or to the ALS Association Golden West Branch.⁠[1]

Noozhawk wrote on September 11 that Fran said Hospice of Santa Barbara had given the family a great deal of support over the previous three years, and that she and Hal had run the local ALS support group together for five years and she meant to carry it on alone; a photo caption in the article has Fran saying that Hal enjoyed life to the end. The article states that once his part in the development of Bitcoin became known, journalists from Forbes, Wired and other national media interviewed him, and that he kept programming for as long as he was able.⁠[2]

Blockworks wrote that a few days after his death prominent members of the Bitcoin community, Erik Voorhees among them, set up a Bitcoin fund in his name for ALS research. Jameson Lopp’s article states that in 2014, when he was in poor health, he was “swatted and extorted.”⁠[18][16]

Bitcoin Magazine wrote on December 28, 2021, that his family, with help from the Bitcoin artist cryptograffiti, had organized the Running Bitcoin Challenge, to be held from January 1 to January 10 and to raise money for the Golden West Chapter of the ALS Association, with participants able to run a half marathon (13.1 miles) and log their miles on the Strava app. The article states that those who raised $100 would receive a sticker of his most famous post; that those who raised $300 would receive two more stickers, one of them with a never-before-seen image of Hal Finney, limited to 100 copies; and that those who raised $300 and ran 13.1 miles between January 1 and January 10 would receive all three stickers and a limited-edition gaiter.⁠[14]

The ALS Network article states that Fran launched the event, that it made its debut in 2021 and that it raised over $40,000 in its first year, of which $6,045 came directly from Bitcoin, with 0.26 BTC in donations; committee members from Vancouver, England and Austria rallied the support of their own running groups, such as the Bitcoin Runners and Team Satoshi, and donations kept arriving throughout January 2022. The article describes a virtual, self-reporting, do-it-yourself event in which participants run, walk or hike the distance of a half marathon, his favorite race distance, over ten days; it is held from January 1 to January 10, ending on the anniversary of his “Running bitcoin” post.⁠[9]

Blockworks, in an article written eight years after his death, stated that Fran hoped to raise $50,000 in bitcoin to help find a cure for ALS through the event of January 1 to 10, and that earlier that month she had taken control of his Twitter account so that it would not be purged under the new policies that Elon MuskElon MuskElon Musk is an entrepreneur who founded SpaceX and has long served as chief executive of Tesla; he also took part in creating PayPal, OpenAI, Neuralink, The Boring Company, and xAI. He acquired Twitter in 2022, and his businesses span spaceflight, electric vehicles, energy, artificial intelligence, and social media.Open the full entry had set for the platform. Blockworks adds that donors of at least $100 would receive an official shirt with the half marathon’s logo and that the top 25 fundraisers would receive a Hal Finney collectible signed by Fran, and that as of the Wednesday morning the article speaks of the event had already secured nearly $10,000 in bitcoin donations. ALS Network states that the second event, held from January 1 to January 10, 2023, raised over $65,204.36 and 0.96 BTC, including $22,571 from Bitcoin, and that it also included an online auction powered by Scarce City.⁠[18][9]

ALS Network wrote in February 2026 that the 2026 event ran from January 10 to January 31 and was in its fifth year, that the Human Rights Foundation and Block were its presenting sponsors, that more than 88 participants and 12 teams had joined, and that over $61,000 had been raised by then toward a goal of $75,000; the proceeds go to the ALS Network’s Hal Finney ALS/MND Research Fund, which supports research on ALS and other motor neuron diseases. Participants run, walk, hike or roll a total of 21.1 km (13.1 miles) in the course of the month, and in 2026 “Run for Hal” events were planned in NevadaNevadaNevada is a state in the western United States bordered by Oregon, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, and California; its capital is Carson City. It was admitted to the Union on October 31, 1864, as the 36th state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 3,104,614.Open the full entry, TexasTexasTexas is a U.S. state in the south-central United States, with its capital at Austin and its largest city Houston. It was admitted to the Union on December 29, 1845, as the 28th state, and the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted 29,145,505 residents.Open the full entry, Norway, Poland, Finland, the Czech Republic, Switzerland and elsewhere. The article states that Fran has led the event in his memory since 2021.⁠[22]

In 2024 the Human Rights Foundation (HRF) created the Finney Freedom Prize, with the approval of Fran Finney, to be awarded to the person who does the most for Bitcoin and human rights in each halving era. The prize consists of a physical award designed by Cryptograffiti and a monetary prize of 1 BTC (100,000,000 satoshis); under its terms there are to be 33 prizes, one for each halving era from 2009–2012 until the block subsidy falls to zero, around the year 2140.⁠[23][24]

The prize description states that the first laureate, for the 2009–2012 era, is Hal Finney and that the first prize was to be announced on the day of the 2024 Bitcoin halving; ALS Network wrote on April 23, 2024, that HRF had announced the creation of the prize. The prize’s main page states that HRF endowed the prize with 33 BTC and that the first prize has been distributed. Under the prize description, each committee submits a shortlist of 5 potential laureates to the Prize Directors no less than 21 days before each halving, and the Prize Directors choose one or two laureates from each list; for the 2012–2016, 2016–2020 and 2020–2024 eras, a seven-member “Genesis Committee” appointed by HRF and the Finney family helps to find suitable laureates, and those three prizes were scheduled to be announced on January 10 of 2025, 2026 and 2027, a day that the main page calls “Running Bitcoin day.” The members of the Genesis Committee listed on the main page are Aaron van Wirdum, Farida Nabourema, Gloria Zhao, Lisa Neigut, Obi Nwosu, Ross Stevens, the founder and chief executive of Stone Ridge Holdings GroupStone Ridge Holdings GroupStone Ridge Holdings Group (SRHG) is a financial-services holding group founded in 2012. Its operating companies include Stone Ridge Asset Management, NYDIG and Longtail Re, spanning asset management, reinsurance, and power and computing infrastructure.Open the full entry, and Vitus Zeller, a co-founder of the Running Bitcoin Challenge.⁠[23][24][25]

An ALS Network article of April 23, 2024, states that Fran was his primary caregiver until his death in 2014, that she then served for many years as a care manager for the ALS Network, and that she was at that time the chair of the Running Bitcoin Challenge.⁠[25]

The ALS Network article states that Fran was a licensed physical therapist who became his caregiver, and that through the Golden West Chapter’s Walk to Defeat ALS and Ride to Defeat ALS programs the couple, with their team “Hal’s Pals,” raised over $25,000.⁠[9]

The obituary calls him a loving and involved father and a caring brother and son, and states that he enjoyed hiking, running, music and flying and that he earned a pilot’s license. Noozhawk wrote that he held a private pilot’s license and loved to fly; Fran said that he used to fly from Santa Barbara Airport to Irvine to bring their daughter, Erin, home from UC Irvine for weekend visits.⁠[1][2]

Noozhawk wrote that he was a mainstay of the local running community and a member of the Santa Barbara Athletic Association; Fran said that his favorite long run was to wait for a very low tide and run from Leadbetter to Goleta Beach. The ALS Network article quotes Fran as saying that running was part of his life and that he planned his daily runs a month ahead; the article states that his daily distances ranged from 7 to 26 miles.⁠[2][9]

Noozhawk wrote in 2010 that the mantel in their living room displayed pictures of their wedding and of their two children, Fran’s plaque for placing first in the State Street Mile, his lifetime achievement award, and the plaque for their team’s fundraising effort at the previous year’s Santa Barbara International Marathon.⁠[5]

In the interview with Scott Stilphen he said that he did not play games much; his two children were then 18 and 20, his son had a PS2, and he had liked the Zelda and Mario games when playing with his children.⁠[6]

Blockworks wrote that the Bitcoin community often suspected him of being Satoshi Nakamoto, a claim that he consistently denied; Decrypt wrote in August 2024 that James Arrowood, Alcor’s president and chief executive, noted that he is one of the people believed to be Satoshi Nakamoto.⁠[18][21]

On October 21, 2023, Jameson Lopp published the article “Hal Finney Was Not Satoshi Nakamoto,” setting out reasons why he was not Satoshi. The article states that on April 18, 2009, while he was running the 10-mile race in Santa Barbara, Satoshi sent 32.5 BTC to Mike Hearn in a transaction that was confirmed in block 11,408 at 8:55 a.m. Pacific time, and that Satoshi also replied to an email from Hearn at 9:16 a.m. Pacific time; Hearn published the full emails in 2017. As evidence that he was on the course at the time the article points to photographs of the event, to a photograph taken by his wife and to ID number 591 in the race results, and it says: “For the hour and 18 minutes that Hal was running, we can be quite sure that he was not interacting with a computer.”⁠[16]

The article also compares the coding style of RPOW with that of the original Bitcoin client: he indented with tabs and used block-style multi-line comments and snake_case function names, whereas Satoshi used spaces, single-line comments and camelCase; as to the stylistic similarities that some have claimed between the two men’s public writing, the author writes that he knows nothing of stylometric analysis and cannot judge them, but that their code is “quite different.” The article states that there were two gaps in Satoshi’s public activity (March 4 to October 21, 2009, and March 24 to May 16, 2010) during which Finney went on posting, and that on August 14–15, 2010, the two days on which Finney attended the Singularity Summit, Satoshi made 4 code check-ins and 17 forum posts. It states that in July 2009 Satoshi made a comment about Hal in an email to Martti Malmi, which the author regards as effectively a denial by Satoshi that the two were the same person; that Hal had explicitly stated that he did not like the idea of a widespread implementation of hashcash; and that the debug log of January 10, 2009, shows Satoshi and Hal using network addresses that belonged to different internet service providers. The article adds that Satoshi appears to have learned of Nick Szabo’s bit gold from Finney’s first reply to the announcement of the white paper. The author’s conclusion is that it is far more likely that Satoshi was someone else.⁠[16]

Finney Freedom Prize: Official website: https://hrf.org/program/financial-freedom/finney-prize/ (opens in a new window).⁠[24]

Alcor Life Extension Foundation: Official website: https://www.alcor.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[26]