In 2008, an anonymous hacker by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto posted the infamous Bitcoin whitepaper, a system for digital transactions using the very proof-of-work system that computer scientist Hal Finney had already invented in 2004. Finney wanted people to have a tool to protect themselves against central banking control schemes. Was Finney Nakamoto?
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In 1954, anarchist computer scientist Hal Finney was born. Before he died, Finney spent a lifetime working on digital anonymity, such as the PGP encryption for email, also known as Pretty Good Privacy.
But his most notable invention was the creation of digital scarcity. By 2004, Finney had invented a reusable proof-of-work system, a system that solved the problem of double-spending transactions in a digital setting by making it impossible to spend the same token twice.
In 2008, an anonymous hacker by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto posted the infamous Bitcoin white paper, a system for digital transactions using the very proof-of-work system that Finney had invented earlier.
When Bitcoin launched on January 3rd, 2009, Hal Finney claims he downloaded the software on the same day. Finney was also the first person to tweet on Twitter using the word ‘Bitcoin’ on January 11th, 2009. And Finney was also the first person ever to receive a Bitcoin transaction from the elusive Satoshi Nakamoto.
Are these mere coincidences? We know that Finney was the inventor of Bitcoin’s proof-of-work system. But was he, perhaps, also Bitcoin’s creator?
What are the odds that a Japanese math professor named Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto (who had nothing to do with Bitcoin) happened to reside 1.6 miles from Hal Finney’s home in Temple City?
Finney died in August 2014 of ALS, a progressive nervous system disease also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. Since his official diagnosis in mid-2009, Finney had been struggling with ALS for over 5 years, meaning his condition may have manifested itself around the time of publication of Bitcoin’s white paper in October 2008.
Finney’s full name was Harold Thomas Finney. But the name Satoshi Nakamoto also happens to be an anagram for “So Thomas ain’t A-OK”. Was the nickname perhaps chosen as a reference to this Thomas’s deteriorating condition?
In 2010, a man named Gavin Andresen took over as Bitcoin’s first lead developer since Satoshi’s departure. The timing might not surprise anyone. Hal Finney, at this point, was suffering from ALS. He had rapidly become physically too incapacitated to maintain the Bitcoin codebase any longer.
Publicly, Finney always denied being “Satoshi Nakamoto”. Still, the biggest evidence for Finney being Nakamoto may be that Bitcoin’s ideology aligned with Finney’s personal politics. He was known to be a political anarchist and a cypher punk who wanted to use computer tools to liberate rather than control the people.
The creator of Bitcoin even hinted at his political convictions in a message recorded inside the Genesis Block, the first Bitcoin block ever mined containing the first 50 coins ever minted. The so-called ‘coinbase’ parameter of that block reads:
The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks
The line refers to a news article from Britain’s The Times, titled, “Chancellor Alistair Darling on brink of second bailout for banks-Billions may be needed as lending squeeze tightens”, and then continues:
The Chancellor will decide within weeks whether to pump billions more into the economy as evidence mounts that the £37 billion part-nationalisation last year has failed to keep credit flowing. Options include cash injections, offering banks cheaper state guarantees to raise money privately or buying up “toxic assets”, The Times has learnt.
Bitcoin, which has a hardcoded limit of 21 million coins, divisible up to eight digits, doesn’t allow inflation, at least not without a hard fork of the protocol. Bitcoin can thus be seen as the solution to bank bailouts, an antidote to the limitless money-printing that declining nations so greedily apply to bail out themselves and their financial elites, at the expense of the common people whose savings are devalued by inflation.
Before Bitcoin, there was ecash, a digital cash system invented by David Chaum. It didn’t work because the system couldn’t yet prevent people from double-spending transactions, the problem to which Finney later presented the solution.
Referring to ecash, Finney once said:
It seemed so obvious to me: “Here we are faced with the problems of loss of privacy, creeping computerization, massive databases, more centralization-and [David] Chaum [the inventor of ecash] offers a completely different direction to go in, one which puts power into the hands of individuals rather than governments and corporations. The computer can be used as a tool to liberate and protect people, rather than to control them.”
To Finney, inventing a digital cash system was all about handing the common people a financial tool that could protect them against central banking control schemes.
Whether or not Finney was Satoshi, what may be of interest to hodlers of Bitcoin is the following: Hal Finney personally calculated that Bitcoin might one day reach a price point of 10 million dollars per coin. And at that rate, the stash of 1 million coins Satoshi likely mined himself shall then be worth around 10 trillion dollars, or over eight times the present net worth of the United States.
Satoshi Nakamoto wanted people to bail themselves out and buy back the world.
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