On March 19, 2013, Hal Finney posted the full account to BitcoinTalk himself, typing it out with a commercial eyetracker system — by then the only input device ALS had left him. He mentions the eyetracker in passing, the way someone mentions a fact about their day rather than a hardship, and moves straight on to Bitcoin’s first weeks.
What he actually claims for himself is modest. He does not call himself Bitcoin’s co-designer or hint at knowing who Satoshi was; he says he downloaded the software, mined “block 70-something,” and became the recipient of the first bitcoin transaction when “Satoshi sent ten coins to me as a test.” The email exchange he describes — “mostly me reporting bugs and him fixing them” — is independently documented: Satoshi’s side survives as a primary source in the January 8, 2009 release notice, and the January 12 follow-up in which Satoshi explained he couldn’t receive incoming connections from where he was is documented in the archive as well; neither contradicts the account Finney gives here from memory, four years later.
What the essay leaves out says as much as what it includes. It closes on his bitcoins and his estate — “I think they’re safe enough. I’m comfortable with my legacy” — without describing the disease’s effect on his thinking, only its effect on his body. Fran Finney told Cryonics Magazine in 2019 that Hal “felt it was affecting his ability to do his fast thinking, to do his mental math,” a decline this essay never mentions. Whether he left it out deliberately or it simply hadn’t become undeniable to him yet in March 2013 is not something the essay itself can settle. Some of the correspondence he alludes to here stayed private until CoinDesk published previously unseen Satoshi-Finney emails in 2020, obtained from Fran after his death — this essay is Finney’s own telling, written while he could still choose what to include.
The line I keep coming back to isn’t the diagnosis or the bitcoins. It’s the offhand one about why he stopped mining in Bitcoin’s first weeks:
Quote from: Hal Finney on March 19, 2013, 8:40:02 PM UTCBut I turned it off because it made my computer run hot, and the fan noise bothered me. In retrospect, I wish I had kept it up longer, but on the other hand I was extraordinarily lucky to be there at the beginning. It’s one of those glass half full half empty things.
He’s describing the decision to walk away from mining bitcoin within days of its existence, and he still reaches for the most ordinary phrase available rather than any sense of what those blocks would become worth. Nobody reading it now can share that ignorance. That he never once does the math himself — not for the coins he stopped mining, not for the ones sitting in the safe deposit box he mentions at the end — is what makes this read as a document instead of a legend written about him after the fact.
