Hal Finney

Harold Thomas Finney II (May 4, 1956 – August 28, 2014) was an American software developer. In his early career, he was credited as lead developer on several console games. He later worked for PGP Corporation. He was an early Bitcoin contributor, and received the first Bitcoin transaction from the currency's creator Satoshi Nakamoto.

Early life and education

Finney was born in Coalinga, California, on May 4, 1956, to Virginia and Harold Thomas Finney. His father was a petroleum engineer. They later moved to Arcadia, California, where Harold Finney II graduated from Arcadia High School in 1974. Afterward, Finney attended the California Institute of Technology, graduating with a BS in electrical engineering in 1979.

Career After graduation from Caltech, he went to work in the computer gaming field for a company that developed video games such as Adventures of Tron, Armor Ambush, Astrosmash and Space Attack. He later went to work for the PGP Corporation where he remained until his retirement in 2011. During the early 1990s, in addition to being a regular poster on the cypherpunks listserv, Finney ran two anonymous remailers. Further cryptographic activism included running a contest to break the export-grade encryption Netscape used, which succeeded in doing so.

Finney was involved in the development of the first anonymous remailer, a tool for sending emails with the sender's identity concealed. He was one of the early contributors to this privacy-enhancing technology, which played a significant role in the cypherpunk movement and the broader field of online privacy. This work further demonstrated Finney's commitment to privacy and his significant contributions to the development of privacy-enhancing technologies.

In 2004, Finney created the first reusable proof-of-work system before Bitcoin. In January 2009, Finney was the Bitcoin network's first transaction recipient.

Bitcoin involvement Finney wrote on the Cypherpunks Mailing List in 1992,

Finney was one of the first Bitcoin users and on January 12, 2009, he received the first bitcoin transaction from Bitcoin's creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. He lived in the same town as a man named Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto (Temple City, California) for 10 years, adding to speculation that he may have been Bitcoin's creator. Extortionists demanded fees of more bitcoins than Finney had left after using most of them to cover medical expenses in 2013. writing: "I hope to be able to read, browse the net, and even participate in conversations by email and messaging (...) I may even still be able to write code, and my dream is to contribute to open source software projects even from within an immobile body. That will be a life very much worth living." Finney and his wife raised money for ALS research with the Santa Barbara International Marathon.

Finney was an active member of the Extropians, a movement of technologists and futurists focused on transhumanism and life extension.