Who is Hal Finney?

Hal Finney is a true pioneer: he was the first person to run the Bitcoin software after Satoshi Nakamoto and he was a key developer during the first year of life of this cryptocurrency.

Hal Finney was born on May 4, 1956 in Coalinga, California. He graduated with a degree in Computer Engineering from the California Institute of Technology (CalTech) in 1979. Later, he began working as a video game developer, working on well-known titles such as Astroblast and Space Attack. Later, he went on to collaborate with PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) of Phil Zimmerman, who signed him shortly after.

Hal Finney: Vital to Bitcoin’s Success

About Bitcoin Hal Finney is known for being the one who most supported this cryptocurrency in its beginnings. After Satoshi published the Whitepaper, Finney was a staunch defender of the project, so much so that the existing evidence clearly indicates that after Satoshi he was the first person to download and run the Bitcoin client.

On January 12, 2009 he received 10 bitcoins from Satoshi in the first bitcoin transaction. During Bitcoin’s first year of life crossed many emails with Satoshi to correct errors in the code.

Pre-Bitcoin stage

One of his publications ended up being fundamental for Bitcoin, specifically in 2004 he published RPOW, a review of HashCash. Previously, in 1993 he published a study about Detecting Double Spend and another about ‘Digital Cash and privacy’. Until the arrival of Bitcoin he collaborated on various crypto mailing lists and is one of the founders and most influential people in the movement Cypherpunk.

Hal Finney was always interested and committed to crypto and privacy issues, but it is from the creation of the Cypherpunk mailing list that he begins to express his reflections on the subject more assiduously and focus fully on this field.

One of his most notable contributions at the beginning of the cypherpunk movement was the creation (along with Eric Hughes) from the first anonymous remailer. This remailer is called Type I and is known as cypherpunk remailer, and which was used for this group’s mailing list.