Hal Finney was the designer of Bitcoin

Hal Finney was the designer of Bitcoin(yro.slashdot.org)

76 points by ableal 2 years ago | 56 comments

lqet 2 years ago |

Or not: https://cryptonews.net/news/bitcoin/27725030

> According to the race data, Finney competed in the “Santa Barbara Running Company Chardonnay 10 Miler & 5K,” starting at 8 am Pacific time and finishing the race at 78 minutes.

> The race, however, coincides with timestamped emails between Satoshi and one of the first Bitcoin developers, Mike Hearn.

kerkeslager 2 years ago | |

Timestamped emails? That's not cryptographic proof.

riffic 2 years ago | |

an email can be sent by cron, this seems like a convenient alibi to craft

alchemist1e9 2 years ago | | |

wasn’t it multiple reply/response of emails during that same short 78 minute time period?

ionwake 2 years ago | | |

i doubt he was crafting cron jobs to send emails when he had no idea bitcoin would get big and he had a marathon to do. tbh I think I can guess a good way to figure out who it was but I am unsure what the incentive would be, and unfortunately it would require effort.

EDIT> Am I being downvoted by people upset that I am suggesting it wasn't Hal or because of my nebulous statement? Oh nvm

natdempk 2 years ago | | |

There are more details addressing a bunch of the first thoughts people might have here: https://blog.lopp.net/hal-finney-was-not-satoshi-nakamoto/

api 2 years ago | |

Satoshi may have been more than one person, but Hal Finney is a good candidate for one of the core designers and someone who was involved.

ChainOfFools 2 years ago | | |

And if he was more than one person, I've never seen any proof that that more-than-one person group could not also include Hearn, and that part of crafting a Satoshi pseudo-identity was to create alibis for those most likely to be suspected of being especially as those involved were highly familiar with, and created bitcoin in its decentralized-ish form precisely to avoid the fates of those centrally involved with earlier e-money products.

But no, any attempt to investigate the origins of Satoshi will be viciously attacked by the same twenty or so individuals who show up everywhere to defend this modern day hermes trismegistus mystery, which has proved infinitely useful, not to mention fun, to keep propped up.

geocrasher 2 years ago |

Wow. Slashdot. Haven't seen that on HN in.... a long time, maybe never? I was a dedicated Slashdot user back in the day. I miss what it used to be.

argiopetech 2 years ago | |

I've seen it here before, but it's rare.

Amusingly for the typical HN CJ, slashdot fell off my radar when Google Reader left us. I had been an avid /. reader for years, but had transitioned to reading through RSS. It went downhill during that time and I never picked it back up.

Still, good memories.

mouzogu 2 years ago |

the white paper was written in British English with a very specific style afaik.

which makes me lean towards Adam Back or Paul Le Roux.

personally I like to think it was Le Roux, which would be insane if true.

https://news.bitcoin.com/the-many-facts-pointing-to-paul-le-...

didntcheck 2 years ago | |

Satoshi was/is a smart man. It's quite possible that he anticipated stylometry and deliberately wrote in a deceptive dialect. Though I've also seen some forensic linguists say they can often see through that unless it's done very well, with the tells being overuse of stereotypical features of the dialect combined with a lack of more subtle indicators like what modal verbs are used, for example. Also I admit this line of "he did that on purpose" reasoning makes anything unfalsifiable when taken to the extreme

mouzogu 2 years ago | | |

> "he did that on purpose"

maybe. he was really trying to hide is identity.

i guess its an occams razor type of thing.

he did also encode the headline from the front page of a British newspaper in the first transaction i believe.

https://monnos.com/en/blog/genesis-block-chancellor-on-brink...

Kathula 2 years ago | |

Adam Back certainly fits the profile the best. Invented Hashcash, has a Ph.D. in Distributed Systems, and is English. He's also still deeply involved with Bitcoin and has a lot of influence, which best can be seen when he successfully proposed the "speedy-trial" activation method for Taproot.

reducesuffering 2 years ago | |

That and Bitcoin was initially a Windows programmer, unlike Hal.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26340430

alchemist1e9 2 years ago | |

or Len Sassaman?

nobrains 2 years ago |

If it was from one of the usual suspects, then it was definitely Szabo.

If you read about it you will come to the same conclusion.

All others can be easily eliminated.

tim333 2 years ago | |

Probably him and Finney with some vague involvement of Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto.

rideontime 2 years ago |

For those commenting without following the link, be aware that this is simply a link to a SlashDot comment.

ak_111 2 years ago |

The "being in a rush" theory sounds very interesting and very plausible combined with adapting a pseudonym to avoid lawsuits.

However, if these were the two reasons behind keeping his identity secret, wouldn't Hal Finney be also the kind of person who leaves some kind of digital trace that confirms his identity as creator even after he is dead? Like automating the execution of a transaction on the genesis block or something?

Apart from wanting to take credit and glory of being creator, he must have had very interesting "war stories" to share concerning the creation of bitcoin, his feelings as he saw it grow... this would have been a very interesting memoir to share with the world.

I am wondering if he left such a document somewhere that will suddenly decrypt itself to the world along with irrefutable evidence of his invention of bitcoin.

slicktux 2 years ago |

Everyone knows it was Paul Le Roux

ionwake 2 years ago | |

im so confused, apparently anyone with the original keys could have signed that blockchain message to Hal.

doesnt that mean the keys "have" been used? I thought the original keys had never been used? Or is it just no money has moved?

alchemist1e9 2 years ago | |

What about Len Sassaman? isn’t he considered a strong candidate also?

qdw 2 years ago | | |

He was critical of blockchain, because he considered a permanent register of transactions to be the antithesis of privacy. How much store you want to set by that is up to you, but my instinct says that he was sincere.

nu11ptr 2 years ago |

I have heard most of this theory before. It sounds plausible to me. What do others think?

nyolfen 2 years ago | |

it was probably several people, at least including finney and szabo

ldargin 2 years ago | |

At the very least Sbazo.

dist-epoch 2 years ago |

> Hal published a paper that describes essentially the whole BitCoin scheme two years before BTC was launched.

What is the paper? Any link? I've never heard this claim before.

fsmv 2 years ago | |

They're talking about RPOW. It's well known and not proof at all.

tokai 2 years ago |

That the creator of bitcoin would be cryopreserved makes a lot of sense.

seltzered_ 2 years ago | |

The life extension / cryopreservation gunk is something that has roots in a thought form of 'extropism' that you'll see in rationalist forums like lesswrong.

I think it's deeply flawed and anthropocentric.

throwaway11460 2 years ago | | |

I think it's the other way around - some people saw the possibilities and formalized their thoughts as extropism. It's not the first group to have these thoughts. See Russian Cosmism, for example.

082349872349872 2 years ago |

I hope this theory is not what led to Hal's having been swatted.

notso411 2 years ago |

Opinion posed as fact.

MilStdJunkie 2 years ago |

Personal conspiracy theory is that "Satoshi" was an early emergent AGI trying to figure out a way to convince maximum monkeys to hook up maximum processing power to a network. And succeeding, apparently. Where are all those processors now?[1]

[1] From early crypto? In the trash, mainly. But it ramped up production, which is what fictional "Satoshi" would want.

skwashd 2 years ago |

All the smart people know it was Craig Wright, right?

rideontime 2 years ago | |

All the people who hold BSV and need it to increase in value "know" it was Craig Wright. Everybody else is able to identify the extremely obvious fraud. https://dankaminsky.com/2016/05/03/the-cryptographically-pro...

tim333 2 years ago | |

Given whoever is popularly identified as Satoshi is probably going to have criminals after him for extorting bitcoins and governments for facilitating money laundering, I'm ok for Craig to do the job.

Jerrrry 2 years ago | |

At least we can agree to stop chasing dragons

monero-xmr 2 years ago |

Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto, who was falsely accused of being the creator of bitcoin, also lived within a few blocks of Hal Finney's home. If that isn't proof enough of Hal at least being somewhat involved, I can't think of a more coincidental fact.

ionwake 2 years ago | |

the funniest and most shallow reason I ever thought that Dorian was somehow involved was he literally said " Ill interview with whoever buys me lunch "

which tbh is just the kind of thing someone involved with bitcoin would say, its just funny and ironic.