On the posthumous 65th Birthday of Finney, Crypto community remembers him for his contribution to blockchain

Hal Finey, a computer scientist was the first to receive a Bitcoin blockchain transaction more than ten years ago and the impact of such transaction on crypto as a technology is still felt.

Also, with some in the space still believing that Satoshi Nakamoto  is one of the pseudonymous individuals to develop Bitcoin, Finney was one of the first pople that responded to his post on the cypherpunks mailing.

Finey, the Legendary Bitcoin pioneer, passed away from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease in 2014 and would have turned 65, of not for the disease.

On Bitcointalk, Finey prior to his dead posted his early experience with cryptocurrency, in which he opined that the several blocks of mining on the BTC network was relatively simple in 2009 and which can be completed with a CPU other than GPU.

“When Satoshi announced the first release of the software, I grabbed it right away,” he said. “I think I was the first person besides Satoshi to run Bitcoin. I mined block 70-something, and I was the recipient of the first Bitcoin transaction, when Satoshi sent ten coins to me as a test. I carried on an email conversation with Satoshi over the next few days, mostly me reporting bugs and him fixing them.”

Finney was a well known cryptographer who worked for the PGP Corporation — later acquired by Symantec — in the development of software allowing users to encrypt emails and files. Even though one of his last messages said he was “essentially paralyzed,” Finney used an eyetracker system to write code aimed at beefing up the security around crypto wallets.

Finney is survived by his two children and wife Fran, who today posted a photo of the Bitcoin pioneer running through a neighborhood in the 1980s, an image retweeted by cryptographer Adam Back. Before his diagnosis, Finney was training to run a full

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