It’s been 14 years since the first Bitcoin transfer. On January 12, 2009, the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto sent 10 Bitcoins to cryptographer and computer engineer Hal Finney. Finney, who passed away in August 2014, was also the first person to install Bitcoin software on his computer after Satoshi.
Finney would share his experiences on a forum called BitcoinTalk in 2013: “When Satoshi announced the software, I immediately got it in the air”. According to his own statement, the lack of any central control over the money was very appealing to him. After installing the software, he mined several Bitcoins. Then he stopped the process due to software problems and excessive fatigue of his computer’s processor.
While these events took place in January 2009, a few months later the scientist was diagnosed with a disease called Lou Gehrig’s disease, which affects nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord and causes loss of muscle control. Finney was paralyzed within a few years.
He didn’t break away from the crypto world
Even in his sick state, he did not break away from the crypto world. He continued to work on Bitcoin, which he contributed to reach these days. He wrote his memoirs. He also started working on a wallet. He explained his working order during his illness as follows:
“I was probably 50 times slower than before. But I still loved programming, and it gave me purpose.”
Even after Finney was paralyzed, he remained in the crypto world.Finney was one of the first people to price Bitcoin in dollars, in response to an email he received from Nakamoto. According to his own calculation, 21 million Bitcoins would come to around 10 million dollars in total. As of today, the total volume of Bitcoin is around 600 billion dollars.
Despite being one of the creators of this ecosystem, he was always cautious about balloon prices. “If people buy Bitcoin with the expectation that it will continue to rise, prices will go up,” Finney said. This is the very definition of a bubble, and we know that one day the bubble will burst.”
Today, the number of people who say that he is the inventor of Bitcoin in the crypto world is not small at all. Finney says Nakamoto is a kind person, based on information from his correspondence with himself.
He used Twitter effectively in those years.
When we look at Hal Finney’s Twitter account, which is managed from time to time by his wife, we see that there was a lot of sharing about cryptocurrencies in 2009. For example, on January 21, 2009, 9 days after making the first Bitcoin transaction, he made a post where he used the phrase “I’m looking at ways to work more anonymity on Bitcoin”. On January 27, he states that he thinks that Bitcoin production triggers carbon emissions. On January 11, 2009, he tweeted that he had installed the Bitcoin software on his computer.
Running bitcoin
— halfin (@halfin) January 11, 2009
The greatest evidence today that Finney is not Satoshi is attributed to his being a Mac user. As it is known, Satoshi is coding the first software on his work on Microsoft Windows. He even asks Laszlo Hanyecz to program it according to the Mac, since the product does not work on the Mac.
It is thought that Nakamoto was not a professional coder or cryptographer. One of the reasons for this is that he used the secp256k1 curve in his software. Many professionals prefer to work with NIST standards.
C++ DIFFERENCE
Also, looking at Nakamoto’s software, it seems that he uses C++. Finney is a solid C user. Hal Finney states in an interview that even this difference alone has proven that he is not Nakamoto. There is also correspondence between Finney and Nakamoto regarding the conflicting versions of the software.
Finney is a very successful programmer and cryptographer. However, it is accepted by almost everyone that he developed the Bitcoin system. Finney’s efforts are great, especially in anonymity.
Finney also has disagreements with Nakamoto regarding the intended use of Bitcoin. It is also possible to see them in their personal correspondence. Finney thinks that the commercialization of Bitcoin and the efforts to mine it with more powerful computers in the future go against the basics of the business.
Sources: Coingeek, Coindesk, Cointelegraph, Kriptokoin.com
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