In the blinding light of a bull market, it’s easy to get lost. We attend conferences where the new kings of crypto hold court, we scroll through feeds dominated by talk of price targets and market caps, and we celebrate the fleeting narratives of the day. But in doing so, we risk forgetting the giants on whose shoulders this entire world was built.
We risk forgetting the first principles.
Today, August 28th, marks eleven years since the passing of a man named Hal Finney. While his body lies cryogenically frozen in Arizona, preserved in liquid nitrogen, his legacy is woven into the very fabric of the system we now trade, build upon, and debate daily.
To understand the present, we must look to the past. To see the future, we must remember the origin. And in the origin story of Bitcoin, there are few figures more essential than Hal Finney.
The First Follower, The Necessary Builder
We all know the genesis block was mined on January 3rd, 2009, by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto. But what happened next is the part of the story that truly matters. For days, the Bitcoin network consisted of exactly two people: its creator, and the first person on Earth to believe in him. That person was Hal Finney.
On January 12th, 2009, Satoshi sent Finney 10 BTC. It was the first transaction in Bitcoin’s history. It wasn’t a trade; it was a test. A signal between two nodes in the digital wilderness.
Finney, already a legendary OG in the cryptography world, immediately understood the revolutionary potential of Satoshi’s whitepaper. He didn’t just read it; he downloaded the software, ran the first node besides Satoshi’s, and spent hours stress-testing the code, reporting bugs, and helping its creator patch the system in its infancy. Without Finney, the fragile experiment that is now a trillion-dollar asset class might have simply flickered and died.
But in a twist of cruel irony, the same year Bitcoin was born, Finney was diagnosed with ALS. As the network he helped nurture began its slow, inexorable growth, his own body began its decline.
The Satoshi Question: A Cypherpunk’s Final Puzzle
The mystery of Satoshi’s identity has become a cottage industry of speculation, but the threads that connect him to Finney are too compelling to ignore. It’s a series of coincidences that feel almost poetic.
In 2014, when Newsweek infamously misidentified a Japanese-American engineer named Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto as the creator of Bitcoin, a media circus descended on his quiet home in Temple City, California. But just a few blocks away, another resident of Temple City was living out his final days: Hal Finney. Did Finney, a master cryptographer, borrow the name of a neighbor for his grand pseudonym? It’s a perfect piece of cypherpunk lore.
The timelines also overlap with a haunting precision. Satoshi’s public presence dwindled after 2010, with a final, definitive sign-off in April 2011: “I’ve moved on to other things.” By then, Finney’s ALS had progressed significantly. One man disappeared into the digital ether; the other was slowly consumed by a physical ailment.
Finney always denied being Satoshi. But the intellectual lineage is undeniable. His 2004 creation, RPOW (Reusable Proofs of Work), was a direct precursor to Bitcoin’s consensus mechanism. It was Finney who first created a system to solve for digital scarcity using computational work. Bitcoin was the final, brilliant step in that journey: a fully decentralized version of the problem Finney had been working on for years.
The True OGs and the Principle of Sacrifice
The question of whether Finney was Satoshi is, ultimately, a parlor game. It misses the point. The more profound truth lies in what they did.
In a world before venture capital, before launchpads, before influencers, two minds connected over a mailing list. They collaborated, tested, and supported each other to bring a radical idea to life. There were no witnesses, no applause — just two computers humming in the quiet corners of the internet.
This is the first principle we have forgotten.
The true OGs of this space were not driven by wealth, but by conviction. They were cypherpunks who believed, as Finney wrote in 1992, that “computer technology can be used to liberate and protect people, rather than to control them.” They were missionaries.
Satoshi’s final act was the ultimate proof of this. By never moving his million-plus BTC, he performed the ultimate “proof of burn.” He proved he created the system not for personal enrichment, but for the world. His final message was not one of hype, but of quiet confidence: “If you don’t believe me or don’t get it, I don’t have time to try to convince you, sorry.” It is the spiritual totem of our community.
And Finney? Even as ALS ravaged his body, leaving him to code with an eye-tracker, his final project was software to strengthen Bitcoin wallets. He contributed until the very end.
A Legacy in Liquid Nitrogen
If medical science ever revives Hal Finney, what world will he wake up to? He will see a trillion-dollar ecosystem he helped ignite. He will see the debates, the tribalism, the immense wealth, and the profound changes his small experiment set in motion.
We cannot know what he would think. But we can choose what we remember.
As we navigate the noise of the current cycle, let us remember the quiet collaboration of Satoshi and Finney. Let us remember that this all began not with a price, but with a principle. The stars that lit the way for us are gone, but their light remains. It is our duty to ensure we are still navigating by it.
The Stars We Forgot: A First Principle for a Noisy World was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.