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Hal Finney was the designer of Bitcoin
- notso411 3y agoOpinion posed as fact.
- nu11ptr 3y agoI have heard most of this theory before. It sounds plausible to me. What do others think?
- lqet 3y agoOr not: https://cryptonews.net/news/bitcoin/27725030 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.
- ionwake 3y ago[flagged]
- riffic 3y agoan email can be sent by cron, this seems like a convenient alibi to craft
- ionwake 3y agoi 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
- uicompat 3y agoIf only it could fit in these damned margins! I’ll bite, what’s your “good guess to figure it out”?
- ionwake 3y agolol nah man nothing special just reading this thread is more useful than anything.
- throwaway11460 3y agoIsn't the whole Bitcoin design based on the idea that it's going to get big?
- cdchn 3y agoDesigning for scalability and expectation of success are two different things to plan for.
- throwaway11460 3y agoSeems like that in literally every other case, Satoshi Nakamoto designed for both.
- fnordpiglet 3y agoIsn’t literally every startup business plan based on the idea that it’s going to get big?
- kerkeslager 3y agoTimestamped emails? That's not cryptographic proof.
- api 3y agoSatoshi 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 3y agoAnd 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.
- skwashd 3y agoAll the smart people know it was Craig Wright, right?
- Jerrrry 3y agoAt least we can agree to stop chasing dragons
- rideontime 3y agoAll 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-provable-con-man/ https://dankaminsky.com/2016/05/03/the-cryptographically-pro...
- tim333 3y agoGiven 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.
- 082349872349872 3y agoI hope this theory is not what led to Hal's having been swatted.
- slicktux 3y agoEveryone knows it was Paul Le Roux
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- alchemist1e9 3y agoWhat about Len Sassaman? isn’t he considered a strong candidate also?
- qdw 3y agoHe 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.
- ionwake 3y agoim 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?
- MilStdJunkie 3y agoPersonal 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.
- 5350-uiop-1130 3y agothe 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-roux-being-satoshi-nakamoto/ https://news.bitcoin.com/the-many-facts-pointing-to-paul-le-...
- reducesuffering 3y agoThat and Bitcoin was initially a Windows programmer, unlike Hal. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26340430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26340430
- alchemist1e9 3y agoor Len Sassaman?
- didntcheck 3y agoSatoshi 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
- 5350-uiop-1130 3y 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-of-second-bailout-for-banks/ https://monnos.com/en/blog/genesis-block-chancellor-on-brink...
- Kathula 3y agoAdam 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.
- geocrasher 3y agoWow. 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- argiopetech 3y agoI'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.
- tokai 3y agoThat the creator of bitcoin would be cryopreserved makes a lot of sense.
- seltzered_ 3y agoThe 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 3y agoI 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.
- rideontime 3y agoFor those commenting without following the link, be aware that this is simply a link to a SlashDot comment.
- dist-epoch 3y 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 3y agoThey're talking about RPOW. It's well known and not proof at all.
- monero-xmr 3y agoDorian 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 3y agothe 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.
- nobrains 3y agoIf 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 3y agoProbably him and Finney with some vague involvement of Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto.
- ak_111 3y agoThe "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.