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Worshipping at the Church of Satoshi has never been a bulletproof vocation. The sect of Hal Finney is a different story.
Yes, even this Supply Shock has spent sizable energy on what Satoshi said over the four-ish short years that the pseudonym was active… and subjected you to all sorts of hypotheticals and assumptions about their motivations for leaving.
Satoshi is/was clearly a brilliant individual. But if their decision to “move onto other things” means anything at all, we must treat whatever Satoshi said or signaled publicly as starting points on a larger journey.
All of Satoshi’s emails and forum posts have only ever set Bitcoin in a certain direction. They rarely cut the actual path.
Hal Finney is someone who did cut the path.
The legendary Cypherpunk would’ve turned 69 years old today, May 4, a day celebrated across the world even beyond Bitcoin circles.
Hal was the second person after Satoshi to ever run the Bitcoin software, only seven days into its lifespan, making him Bitcoin’s first real user.
“When Satoshi announced the first release of the software, I grabbed it right away,” Hal said on BitcoinTalk in March 2013. “I mined block 70-something, and I was the recipient of the first bitcoin transaction, when Satoshi sent ten coins to me as a test. I carried on an email conversation with Satoshi over the next few days, mostly me reporting bugs and him fixing them.”
We can only ever infer the pre-Bitcoin history of Satoshi. There’s no record of the pseudonym before the white paper. He appeared out of the ether, a manifestation of the radical corpus that contained the Cypherpunk mailing list, Tim May’s Crypto Anarchist Manifesto and David Chaum’s voluminous academic papers.
Hal’s own history is meanwhile woven into the very texts from which Satoshi sprung. Living in Temple City, California, he spent years closely developing Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) with Phil Zimmermann — another Cypherpunk legend — when it was still unclear whether contributing to the software was an illegal act. Hal worked there until he retired in 2011.
Hal also built and operated two of the first-ever cryptographically-based anonymous remailers in the early ‘90s, which novelly allowed users to send emails without revealing any information about their identities.
These are acts of activism. Hal had pushed persistently, for decades, in defense of our right to privacy in a digital world increasingly surveilled by governments and corporations. He was also a key force in the protracted Cypherpunk war for anonymous digital cash that gave us Bitcoin.
“When Satoshi announced Bitcoin on the cryptography mailing list, he got a skeptical reception at best. Cryptographers have seen too many grand schemes by clueless noobs. They tend to have a knee jerk reaction,” Hal recounted.
“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 fascinating.”
Fitting Hal’s legacy into this humble article will never be feasible. Still, I can say this: In 2025, it’s very easy to take our right to encryption — the shared core ingredient for online freedom and Bitcoin — for granted.
End-to-end and other manners of encryption may now be commonplace, but there are still grave concerns over the power that tech companies, financial intermediaries and state forces have over our lives. We are surveilled by default and complacency is too convenient. Normalized.
Hal built and sharpened tools for mitigating those threats, even right up until the end of his life. We must use those tools and all others like them. Promote them.
“Currently I’m working on something Mike Hearn suggested, using the security features of modern processors, designed to support ‘Trusted Computing,’ to harden Bitcoin wallets,” Hal posted on BitcoinTalk around 18 months before his passing, even as he was “essentially paralysed” due to ALS.
“It’s almost ready to release. I just have to do the documentation.” Hal was referring to bcflick, for which he’d earlier released a prototype.
Cypherpunks write code.
Hal Finney wrote code.
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