21 BTCHal Finney
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In plain words
Hal Finney: Cryptographer, first person besides Satoshi to run Bitcoin, recipient of the first transaction. Cypherpunk and PGP developer who built RPOW, his own proof-of-work currency. He ran Bitcoin from day one and received 10 BTC from Satoshi in block 170.
Background
- Caltech, BS in electrical engineering
- PGP Corporation
- Cryptographic payment schemes; RPOW, his proof-of-work currency (his own words)
Connections
- Satoshi Nakamoto: Received 10 BTC from Satoshi in block 170 and emailed him bug reports
- Wei Dai: “extensively correspond[ed]” with Wei Dai (his words)
- Nick Szabo: “extensively correspond[ed]” with Nick Szabo (his words)
In their own words
“Bitcoin seems to be a very promising idea.” (7 Nov 2008, via Cryptography mailing list (metzdowd))
“Running bitcoin” (11 Jan 2009, via Twitter)
“When Satoshi announced the first release of the software, I grabbed it right away. I think I was the first person besides Satoshi to run bitcoin.” (19 Mar 2013, via BitcoinTalk)
From the Bitcoin Museum
“Running bitcoin” (11 Jan 2009): Hal Finney tweets two words at 03:33 UTC (10 January in California). He was the first person besides Satoshi to run the software.
See also
- Satoshi NakamotoSatoshi Nakamoto: Creator of Bitcoin (pseudonym), active 2008–2011. Wrote the Bitcoin whitepaper (31 Oct 2008), mined the genesis block and released Bitcoin v0.1 (8 Jan 2009). Handed the project to other developers in December 2010 and stopped writing in April 2011.
- Wei DaiWei Dai: Computer engineer, author of b-money, reference [1] of the whitepaper. Described b-money in 1998: money created by solving computational problems and kept on pseudonymous accounts. Satoshi wrote that Bitcoin “expands on your ideas into a complete working system”.
- Nick SzaboNick Szabo: Computer scientist and legal scholar; proposed bit gold and smart contracts. Described bit gold, a chain of proof-of-work strings with a distributed title registry. Satoshi named Bitgold together with b-money as Bitcoin's predecessors in 2010. The whitepaper does not cite it.
References
- X · @halfin x.com
- metzdowd.com metzdowd.com
- x.com x.com
- bitcointalk.org bitcointalk.org