On October 5, 2009, two months after his ALS diagnosis, Hal Finney posted an essay titled “Dying Outside” on the rationalist forum LessWrong. Nine months earlier he had become Bitcoin’s second known operator with his “Running bitcoin” tweet of January 11, 2009, and the following day the first known recipient of bitcoins from Satoshi Nakamoto. The essay never mentions Bitcoin. It is about what the disease would take from him and what it would not. Seventeen days after the diagnosis, he had tweeted that he had just got back from an 11-mile run and treasured each one now; Fran later wrote that a half marathon on September 6, 2009, was his last real run.
The essay’s argument. Finney opens with a black joke about a doctor who answers “Ten” and then, after looking at his watch, “Nine.” Then he turns to his own news:
Hal Finney (LessWrong post, October 05, 2009, 2:45:02 AM UTC)Unfortunately I have been diagnosed with a fatal disease, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis or ALS, sometimes called Lou Gehrig’s disease. ALS causes nerve damage, progressive muscle weakness and paralysis, and ultimately death.
He sees two bright spots. The first is that ALS normally leaves higher brain functions intact: “Even as my body is dying outside, I will remain alive inside.” The second is survival. When breathing begins to fail, a patient can go onto invasive mechanical respiration or die in comfort, and Finney writes that he was very surprised to learn that over 90% of ALS patients choose to die. He traces much of that choice to a misjudgment: people assume life on a machine would be poor, while most people living on respirators describe their quality of life as acceptable to good. Against that figure he sets his own hope, “I hope that when the time comes, I will choose life,” and ends on what such a life could hold:
Hal FinneyI may even still be able to write code, and my dream is to contribute to open source software projects even from within an immobile body. That will be a life very much worth living.
The essay is not a farewell. It lists what Finney meant to keep: reading, the net, conversations by email, a synthetic model of his own voice, and, if he could manage it, code.
What came after. Fatigue and voice problems forced him to retire in early 2011. On March 19, 2013, he posted “Bitcoin and Me” on BitcoinTalk. By then he was, in his words, “essentially paralyzed,” fed through one tube and breathing with help from another, and working the computer with a commercial eyetracker. He reported that he had recently discovered he could still write code, “probably 50 times slower than I was before,” and that he was working on an idea from Mike Hearn: using the security features of modern processors to harden Bitcoin wallets.
Cryonics. The essay does not mention cryonics, but Finney had long planned for it. He and his wife Fran signed their Alcor Life Extension Foundation membership papers on October 15, 1992, and Fran later recalled that he simply wanted to see what the world would turn into. When he died on August 28, 2014, Alcor cryopreserved him as its 128th patient.
In 2009 Finney hoped he might still write code from an immobile body. In 2013, on the eyetracker, he was writing it, fifty times slower.
