Member/Patient Profile: Hal Finney
We are in the process of adding more Member Profiles to the website from back issues of Cryonics magazine. Hal Finney’s Member Profile from Cryonics, 2nd Quarter 2019, is actually a Patient Profile — Hal was cryopreserved in 2014.
Hal, who had cryopreservation arrangements with the Alcor Foundation for over 20 years, was Bitcoin’s earliest-ever adopter. He was the very first debugger and contributor to Bitcoin’s code and was the recipient of the first Bitcoin transaction in January 2009, receiving 10 bitcoins from Bitcoin’s possibly pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto. Prior to that, Hal was a lead developer on several console games; graduated from the California Institute of Technology with a BS in engineering; was a noted cryptographic activist, including running the first cryptographically based anonymous remailer; and in 2004 created the first reusable proof of work system before Bitcoin.