Who is Hal Finney?

Hal Finney was an early Bitcoin contributor, cypherpunk and a developer at PGP Corporation. Here’s a story about his life.

Mr. Finney made advancing online privacy his life’s work, and he took part in the first Bitcoin transaction, when Satoshi Nakamoto sent him 10 Bitcoins. Learn more about his biography and his legacy in Bitcoin.

On January 10, 2009, Hal Finney published a Twitter post about launching Bitcoin software. Bitcoin enthusiasts have celebrated the anniversary of this tweet before, but a year ago, with the 10th anniversary of Bitcoin, Twitter hosted a real campaign to repost this post. Hal Finney, the recipient of the first Bitcoin transaction and one of the active Bitcoin developers, died in 2014 after five years of illness. Here’s his story.

South California, childhood

Harold Thomas Finney was born in 1956 in the small town of Coalinga, California. Hal’s father was an employee of Union Oil of California for a long time, and as a result, his family often changed their place of residence. As was common in many families in the 1950s, Mrs. Finney supported her husband and children as a housewife. By 1957, they were a family of five, with Hal as the third child. He and his brother were so similar that they were often mistaken for twins. Hal admired his naughtiness and sometimes followed his brother’s example, but eventually showed personality, being more serious, dedicated to learning and inclined to intellectual puzzles.

He created analog codes of letters and numbers that encrypted, as it later became clear, harmless materials such as pamphlets. In this way, the foundation for his future career as a developer and privacy advocate was laid already in primary school. Computers were not popular in schools until the 80s, but Hal High School in Arcadia was lucky to have some of the earliest samples. The administration used perforated cards in conjunction with Fortran to digitally store simple data, such as student attendance records. Somehow, Hal communicated his interest to the school administration and was entrusted with helping with some of the calculations. Classmates often noticed him walking down corridors with a stack of hard rectangular perforated cards in his hands. Hal graduated from Arcadia High School in 1974 with honors, demonstrating excellent final exam results and securing a place in the prestigious California Institute of Technology.

Famous in Caltech

First he took an interest in mathematics, then he became interested in engineering. Hal was content to attend all available programming classes, as there was no corresponding degree in computer programming at the time, for which he had a real passion. “In Caltech attendance of some humanitarian subjects was mandatory, but Hal often avoided them. He was inspired by new ideas, concepts. “He was learning “for his own pleasure” — he took classes that he liked and just took his exams for what seemed like a waste of time,” says his wife Fran.

Fran and Hal met less than a month after Hal arrived, during what’s known as “rotation week” on campus. The pinnacle of a non-statutory relationship, as with any institution, was a period when senior students demonstrated their own superiority over freshmen. When Hal first came to Fran’s attention, he was literally on top of it. Having been gifted and graduated a year early, Fran was already in high school. “I saw him being lifted and carried,” she recalls. “There was a certain strength in him that seemed unusual to her for a simple technician. By fate, we found ourselves in the same dormitory and immediately became friends.

Hal took part in the 24-hour relay race in Caltech, where teams of runners ran a mile in turn, passing the baton to each other over the course of the entire day. Active participation in informal sports activities was not enough to qualify students for PE … students had to attend classes to complete the full course. Without this, they were not allowed to attend until the final exam. The administration’s PE policy was so unhelpful to Hal that he did not attend classes, confident that he could appeal the decision. In the end, his appeal was rejected, and he had to comply with that requirement and enroll in Caltech for his fifth year.

Although Hal might have seemed stubborn, he was a humble young man and a convinced libertarian connoisseur of common sense and freedom (except for harming others). These values shaped his relationship with other students, attracting the attention of many, not just his future wife. “Whenever he gathered a large audience to engage in all kinds of philosophical discussions,” Fran recalls his student years with Hal, “and all his statements were so thoughtful and interesting. He always had a strong argument for what he said … I admired it. It was really obvious that he was smart… The technology sector has special people. Hal was one of them.” In addition to a thoughtful approach to the debates and conversations among the cohorts, Hal was also distinguished for his tenacity and attention. “He certainly listened more than he talked,” says Fran. “But when he spoke, it was really worth listening to.”

After Fran graduated in 1976, their friendship grew into an affair that lasted over 30 years. In 1979, after Hal’s fifth and final year at Caltech, they got married. The ceremony was held in San Diego Park, near Fran’s house.

From student to cryptographer

Hal got his first job in the summer of 1978 at APh, a small engineering firm founded four years earlier. By that time the company had a good contract with Mattel to develop their Intellivision system. During his time at APh, Hal worked on Intellivision’s “Space Battle” and “Star Strike” as well as the Atari (VCS), Adventures of Tron, Astroblast and Space Attack computer systems. Referring to several of his other projects (cash registers, Bausch and Lomb spectrometer and camera special effects management software), Hal said, “I never considered myself a game developer. I was more of a general developer working in the Assembly language. After APh, Hal developed operating systems with Ametek for several years until he and his family moved to Santa Barbara in 1991, where he took a position at Greenhill Software, developing code generators and optimizers.

Family life

“Hal was a very good father,” says Fran. “He was very grateful and proud that the children let him be like that. The children’s kindness allowed Hal to make every effort to pamper them properly.

For example, he developed a program that matched letters to pictures (“C” — “Cow” etc.) to help his son Jason learn the alphabet and learn to read. Then they got a call from their son’s kindergarten complaining about the “subversive nature of parents,” who were teaching their children to read in advance. Thanks to the knowledge he had gained from a simple computer game, Jason learned to read newspapers.

Needless to say, the Finns were among the first members of the online community. When the World Wide Web became publicly accessible in 1991, they were already subscribed to Prodigy (the second most popular Internet service provider after CompuServe), with which they had collaborated since 1990.

Cypherpunks

Around the same time, Hal began to communicate quite actively with cypherpunks. On his personal website were posted several articles on digital cash, privacy policy, anonymous re-mailers, which he wrote for publication in the electronic newsletter. In fact, Hal launched the first cryptographic-based anonymous re-mailer, a server that can receive and send messages to a specific recipient(s) using built-in instructions without changing the source. While Hal was earning a reputation in cryptographic circles, veteran programmer Phil Zimmerman asked him for help. So Hal developed early versions of Zimmerman’s encryption program called Pretty Good Privacy (PGP). He originally spent the nights writing code for free because he was inspired by the very idea.

After this he had no idea that PGP was destined to become the most popular e-mail encryption software in the world. Hal’s skills helped Zimmerman get financial support for the commercial version. In 1996 Zimmerman founded PGP Inc, and Hal was promoted to senior software engineer. He remained with a company that through a series of acquisitions transformed into Network Associates, Inc., after PGP Corporation and then Symantec until he retired in early 2011.

Over the years, Hal continued to pursue his interest in cryptography, developing his first “reusable proof of performance” algorithm in 2004. Hal presented this development at a conference in San Francisco in 2005, pre-practicing his own talk with Fran.

Bitcoin

In early 2009, his son Jason noticed that his father’s processor was running at full speed 24/7. “Then the father mentioned that he was helping someone test a kind of prototype online cash system. That’s how he felt about it — for him it was just a prototype test.” Hal’s look at these first few days of research is justified by his increased attention to process and detail. In his message to the Bitcoin Forum on March 19, 2013, he wrote: “When Satoshi announced the first release of the software, I immediately grabbed on to it. I think I was the first Bitcoin user since Satoshi. We talked to Satoshi by e-mail, and when he sent me 10 coins as a test, I was the recipient of the first Bitcoin transaction.”

“Today, Satoshi’s true identity has become a mystery. But at that time I thought I was dealing with a very intelligent and sincere young man of Japanese origin. I was lucky to know a lot of wonderful people throughout my life, so I pay attention to the signs of destiny” … “A few days later Bitcoin was working quite steadily, and I left him alone. Those were the days when the difficulty was one, and you could find blocks with the CPU without even using the GPU. Over the next few days, I got a few blocks, but I decided to unplug because my desktop PC (IBM) was overheating, and I was worried about the fan noise. In retrospect, I regret that I didn’t keep up the good work, but on the other hand, I was extremely lucky to be at the very source. This is one of those examples of a half full and half empty glass.”

it makes sense that Hal was surprised by Bitcoin’s success. Jason recalls, “[My father] was kind of shocked when it turned out that Bitcoin was really valuable.” Fran confirms, explaining it in the following way: “I think it was, in a way, Hal’s point of view: ‘This is great. It’s a fun game. Look! It actually works! Some of my ideas might someday be useful.” As soon as Bitcoin took off… Hal’s excitement inspired what he called Bitcoin Christmas… [he found] Bitcoin retailers to give something to everyone in his family. For Fran, he found alpaca woollen socks that will forever be known in their home as her Bitcoin socks.

Fatal diagnosis

In 2008, as an ardent advocate of a healthy lifestyle, Hal began participating in semi-marathons and eventually in marathons. He followed the 2010 Boston Marathon but had to qualify for the 13-mile Los Angeles Marathon in the spring of 2009 … but Hal had to get off the track because of a severe cramp [which] was strange given his training. A similar episode occurred shortly after and while riding a bike. Hal was an excellent cyclist with even some triathlon experience. At one point, he and Fran decided to celebrate their anniversary by cycling a distance equal to the number of years they had been married. When their children were old enough to be home alone, Hal and Fran even changed their marriage tradition.

In July 2009, 30 years after their wedding in San Diego, Hal was tired of travelling before they reached their destination. “We had to travel 30 miles,” says Fran. “It used to be easy, but this time he couldn’t take the pressure…” A week later, he got his official diagnosis.

ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis) is a progressive degenerative disease in which the neurons that control the arbitrary muscles (muscles that usually attach to the skeleton) die. As the disease progresses, body functions such as speech, food, movement and, ultimately, breathing are impaired. Of course, a diagnosis such as ALS can cause anxiety, depression or apathy. Hal was paralysed, unable to eat or even breathe on his own, and had to use a speech synthesizer and eye-tracking sensors to communicate. However, when he shared his diagnosis at the Bitcoin Forum, he still showed great resilience, gratitude and ingenuity. “Even with ALS, my life pleases me,” he wrote.

Hal’s words were processed by an interface he created to control the wheelchair and a project to improve the safety of Bitcoin wallets. Despite being forced to be slow, Hal added..: “…I still love programming, it helps me set new goals.”

Until the end, he continued to work and travel around the house in his motorised wheelchair or took the bus to UCSB, where he continued his research.

Cryonics in the long term

As an atheist since his youth, Hal read Robert Oettinger’s seminal book The Perspective of Immortality and began studying cryonics in his first year of college. “He wasn’t afraid of death” — Fran shares his memories. They were a perfect complement to each other in this regard, as death was at the top of her list of fears. “When I met Hal, I didn’t even want to think about death. I was terrified at the thought of it alone.”

A few years after the wedding, it was Hal who convinced her to consider cryonics in the long term. They had plenty of time to assess achievements that could occur years before their own cryopreservation. So the couple made a formal decision. On October 15, 1992, the thirteenth year of their marriage, they left their new home in Santa Barbara for Riverside, where Alcor was based, to sign membership papers. Twenty years later it became clear that their decision in October ’92 had exceeded their expectations. Hal’s disease was spreading rapidly and began to affect his brain. “It’s not a classic kind of dementia,” says Fran, “but his brain is suffering. Hal felt it was affecting his ability to think and calculate quickly. He felt that he was losing his grip … but that it wasn’t over yet.”

The couple decided that once he was no longer able to communicate with his friends and family, even with many technical means, this would signal the procedure. They planned to do this in Scottsdale, where before rapid cryopreservation support for vital functions would cease and his body would stop functioning ‘on its own’. This happened on 26 August 2014. Two days later, he became Alcor’s 128th patient.

According to many of Hal’s friends and family, he was a very optimistic futurist and a true supporter of change. That’s another reason why cryonics was so attractive to him. He was interested in many of the technological possibilities of the future, such as nanotechnology, singularity, artificial intelligence, and consciousness loading.

He may be dead now, but his legacy still lives in Bitcoin. Cryptocurrency is widely used by people all around the world, people who even may not know who is Hal Finney. Thanks to his contribution to cryptocurrency world you now have a rare opportunity to get value from the virtual asset. Join our Bitcoin cloud mining platform Hashmart.io and get BTC on a daily basis. Rest in Peace, sir Harold Thomas Finney.