Hal Finney
Hal Finney was a computer scientist and one of the first Bitcoin contributors. In addition, Finney was somewhat of an activist for the cryptography space. As early as 1992, Hal is quoted as supporting a system which “puts power into the hands of individuals rather than governments and corporations”.
See Timeline
Died
58
Loc
CAL
Nat
USA
Timeline
1992
LIBERTARIAN VIEWS
Hal Finney was extremely concerned about the lack of privacy and the amount of centralisation in society, often writing on the Cypherpunks mailing list. It’s highly likely his opinions were viewed by Satoshi Nakamoto who created Bitcoin on similar beliefs 16 years later.Source
1998
CRYPTO98
10 years before the release of the Bitcoin Protocol, Hal Finney talked at the Crypto98 conference in California. Hal’s talk focused on the idea of Zero-Knowledge Proofs. This protocol went on to play a huge part in the security of Bitcoin—as well as other blockchains—as it could be used to establish where transactions originated from, where they went and how much money was transferred.Source
2004
RPoW
Many Cypherpunks have attempted to create their own form of digital cash over the last 30 years. However, Hal’s Reusable Proof-of-Work system was perhaps one of the only digital cash systems that ever functioned as a piece of software. Satoshi built on the RPOW system to develop Bitcoin.Source
2009
The First Bitcoin
Hal received the first-ever Bitcoin transaction of 10BTC from Satoshi in January 2009. In the following days, Hal and Satoshi exchanged emails with the former flagging bugs for the Bitcoin creator to fix.Source
Next up
