Many people have suspected that Hal Finney is the true body of Nakamoto. Because Hal Finney, who has been engaged in cryptography for a long time and is a password punk, was the first person to receive bitcoin, and more importantly, this bitcoin was sent to him by Nakamoto. Hal Finney has been passionate about the Bitcoin project since its inception. Just a decade ago, he released the first tweet about Bitcoin:
Some people speculate that Hal Finney is Nakamoto, and part of the reason is that Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto has lived in the town where Hal Finney is located for 10 years. But both Hal Finney and Dorian Satoshi Nakamot denied that they were involved in creating Bitcoin.Today, there are thousands of tweets about Bitcoin.
At that time, however, Hal Finney’s purpose in making this tweet might be to get his followers to participate in the project. Early news about cryptocurrencies is always appealing. At that time, no one knew that cryptocurrency would become a rapidly developing economic force in the global market.
When mainstream financial analysts first contact Bitcoin, they usually think that it is impossible to withstand the test of time. However, in addition to bitcoin, there are thousands of cryptocurrencies.
Eleven days after the last tweet was sent, Hal Finney sent a tweet saying that Bitcoin lacks anonymity:
Forward-looking about the environmental impact of Bitcoin mining
After 6 days, Hal Finney had a deep understanding of Bitcoin. He wants to know the impact of cryptocurrency mining on the environment.
After a few years, environmentalists began to condemn the energy use of Bitcoin mining. However, when this tweet was released, Bitcoin’s computing power was only 1.00, except for the mining prize of 50 bitcoins, most of Bitcoin’s blocks were empty. A typical personal computer can still dig bitcoin without excess energy consumption.
The ASIC and GPU miners were only put into use a year later.Although Hal Finney died in 2014, in the middle of last year, someone asked him 100,000 bitcoins and called him “Zhong Ben Cong”:
The address received 0.115 bitcoins in November last year.Hal Finney is the second employee of PGP, which builds on the open source, very good private public key cryptography developed in the early 1990s.
For email and other communication types on the web, PGP and GPG (a free open source alternative implementation) are still the most frequently used encryption protocols. Symantec acquired PGP in 2010 for $300 million. At that time, Hal Finney was watching the booming of Bitcoin and became an important figure in the Bitcoin community.
Early thoughts about Bitcoin taxation
Hal Finney talked about Bitcoin’s taxation in a final post in the Bitcointalk community. It was not until a few months later that the government began to use the term bitcoin. Hal Finney said:
I got a lot of bitcoin by mining. It has nothing to do with money, so I intend to treat Bitcoin as a precious metal and declare my profits as capital gains. Because I started digging bitcoin more than a year ago, they are long-term capital gains. This is not as flattering as it is, because it turns out that precious metals, even gold bars, are considered “treasures” and their tax rate is 28%.
The normal tax rate is 15%, and if your overall tax rate is below 28%, you can pay a lower tax rate. According to my reading of the IRS documents, I intend to do so.Hal Finney died on August 28, 2014 and died of “gradual freezing” (a motor neurodegenerative disease, which Hawking also suffers from).