Hal Finney

Harold Thomas Finney II was an American software developer. After early work on video games, he joined Phil Zimmermann's effort on PGP, contributing to PGP 2.0 in the early 1990s, and later became one of the first employees of PGP Corporation.

Cypherpunk

Finney ran one of the first cypherpunk anonymous remailers and was an active participant on the mailing list. In 2004 he built Reusable Proofs of Work (RPOW), which used a trusted computing platform to make Hashcash tokens transferable, an early attempt at digital scarcity.

Bitcoin

He was among the first to run the Bitcoin software, and on 12 January 2009 received the first Bitcoin transaction from Satoshi Nakamoto. Finney was diagnosed with ALS in 2009 and continued to program until shortly before his death in August 2014; his body was cryopreserved by the Alcor Life Extension Foundation.

Timeline

• 1956-05-04Born in Coalinga, California.
• 1991Begins contributing to PGP 2.0.
• 2004Releases Reusable Proofs of Work (RPOW).
• 2009-01-12Receives the first Bitcoin transaction from Satoshi Nakamoto.
• 2014-08-28Dies of complications from ALS in Scottsdale, Arizona.