Just about 9.00 am August 28th, 2014, Hal Finney was declared clinically dead in the ICU of a Scottsdale hospital in Arizona. Battling with ALS for 5 years, HAl Finney is now in a cryopreservation in preparation for the arrival of the new tech that might cure him. The adventure for the next step in Hal Finney’s accomplished Life started earlier this week with his wife arriving at Scottsdale.
He was a prominent member of the Extropy institute chat list for many years, delivering the news to the institute which was received with shock. Max more, CEO of Alcor said “Immediately after pronouncement of legal death, Alcor’s standby team went into action, restoring circulation, ventilation, administering an array of medications, and initiating external cooling. Surgery is currently underway to enable us to replace Hal’s blood and interstitial fluids with cryoprotectant. Once perfusion is finished we will be able to plunge Hal’s temperature down past the freezing point without any significant ice formation. Once he is down to around -110 degC we will slow cooling and take a couple more days to reach the final storage temperature of -196 degC. After that, Hal will be placed in long-term storage and cared for until the day when repair and revival may be possible.”
He was a pioneer of Bitcoin, the first recipient from the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto, using his cryptographic software to receive the first Bitcoin payment in January 12th, 2009.
Hal-ey was well into ALS progression by march 2013 he stated in a thread in the bitcointalk where the present bitcoin community spent years decribing his thought’s.
Today, I am essentially paralyzed. I am fed through a tube, and my breathing is assisted through another tube. I operate the computer using a commercial eyetracker system. It also has a speech synthesizer, so this is my voice now. I spend all day in my power wheelchair. I worked up an interface using an arduino so that I can adjust my wheelchair’s position using my eyes.
Hal Finney ended that post, which was one of his last, with these salient words:
Even with the ALS, my life is very satisfying. But my life expectancy is limited. Those discussions about inheriting your bitcoins are of more than academic interest. My bitcoins are stored in our safe deposit box, and my son and daughter are tech savvy. I think they’re safe enough. I’m comfortable with my legacy.
Well this is a brief tribute to one of our brother from the cryptography brotherhood(just kidding) who is making the world spin.
