If one were compiling a ledger of technology’s greatest disappearances-dotty inventors, silk-suited fraudsters, exiled oligarchs-then Hal Finney, who could be the Don Quixote or perhaps simply the Jeeves to Satoshi Nakamoto’s Wooster, would land rather high in the charts.
Twelve years ago, just before he retired from the Bitcoin forum for the last time, Finney issued what’s now regarded as the blockchain equivalent of a royal wave. 👋 “Gone but not forgotten,” chirped Pete Rizzo with solemnity befitting a minor royal attending a ribbon-cutting for an experimental library. One suspects the crypto crowd toasted this event with chamomile tea and speculative tweets.
✨ A dozen years since Hal closed the door on Bitcoin forum pleasantries, presumably to focus on more pressing affairs such as existing.
Gone but not forgotten 🧡
– The Bitcoin Historian (@pete_rizzo_) August 9, 2025
Finney-American software developer, unwitting hero, and possible candidate for the crown of Satoshi-was the first to receive a Bitcoin transaction. Whether he wore a monocle at the time remains undocumented, but it would have suited the occasion. 🧐
In that fateful year of 2013, Finney declared to BitcoinTalk-so publicly, with admirable lack of British reserve-that his limbs had staged a protest and refused to operate. Yet he continued tinkering with code, proving that devotion to financial heresy overcomes most bodily misdemeanor.
August 2013 arrived. Finney penned his swan song on the forum, logging off with the grace of a country vicar resigning luxuriously before a scandal could break. A year later, having fought ALS with more dignity than one usually reserves for tax offices, he departed this mortal coil on August 28, 2014.
Satoshi mystery
The legend of Satoshi Nakamoto still lingers like the smell of cigar smoke in a gentlemen’s club. Questions abound: Was it Finney? Was it some mysterious hermit? Was it, just possibly, an advanced spam bot with a penchant for cryptography?
Hal Finney endured relentless scrutiny, though up to his last breath he denied, with the practiced air of someone refusing a second sherry, any connection to Satoshi except as the recipient of the inaugural transaction.
For scholars: The first Bitcoin was mined on January 3, 2009, a date presumably selected for its numerological ambiguity. Then Satoshi departed, slipping quietly away from digital society with a single cryptic email in April 2011-like an eccentric uncle announcing he’s “gone to feed the ducks” and never returning. Since then, Satoshi has been heard from as often as Atlantis. 🦆
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2025-08-10 18:26