Have you ever stopped to think about who was really the second person to use Bitcoin? That’s right, while everyone is speculating about Satoshi Nakamoto, there’s a figure who deserves much more recognition: Hal Finney. And there’s a very peculiar detail in his story.

On August 28, 2013, Hal Finney passed away. But instead of a conventional burial, his body was taken to a cryogenics clinic in Arizona. There, frozen in liquid nitrogen, he awaits the day when future medicine can bring him back. Hal Finney has been frozen for over a decade, waiting for a future that perhaps will never come.

But who was Hal Finney really? In the crypto community, he is practically a legend. On January 3, 2009, someone using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin. Nine days later, Satoshi sent 10 BTC to Finney. Done: the first transaction in history. At that time, the network had only two people running nodes. Today, Bitcoin is worth over $1 trillion, but it started as an experiment between two guys exchanging digital coins.

Finney was not just any user. In 1991, he was already the second programmer recruited by Phil Zimmermann to work on PGP, that encryption software used by everyone to protect themselves. Finney rewrote the entire encryption algorithm, making PGP 2.0 much faster and more secure. After that, he became a central figure in the cypherpunk movement, a group of hackers who believed privacy was a fundamental right.

In 2004, Finney created the RPOW (Reusable Proof of Work). Basically, you performed a proof of work consuming computational power, sent it to his server, and received a token that could be transferred to another person. Doesn’t that sound familiar? Because four years later, on October 31, 2008, Satoshi published the Bitcoin whitepaper on the same cypherpunk mailing list. Finney immediately saw it: “Bitcoin seems like a very promising idea.” He understood that Satoshi had solved the problem he couldn’t: total decentralization, without any server, trusting no one.

Here’s where it gets interesting. In 2014, Newsweek published an article claiming to have found the real Satoshi Nakamoto: an American of Japanese descent named Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto in Temple City, California. Spoiler: it was all wrong, Dorian was just an unemployed engineer with nothing to do with Bitcoin. But here’s the kicker: Hal Finney also lived in Temple City. He lived there for 10 years, just a few blocks from Dorian’s house.

Does that mean Finney used the neighbor’s name as a pseudonym? Maybe. Or maybe it’s just a coincidence. The fact is, there are speculations about whether Hal Finney was really Satoshi Nakamoto. Some people analyzed Japanese characters in the name Satoshi and found connections to Finney’s name. But Finney himself denied this in 2013, and even published email exchanges with Satoshi showing two very different personalities.

What’s undeniable is the strange temporal overlap. Satoshi’s last public appearance was in April 2011, when he wrote, “I’ve moved on to other things.” After that, he disappeared. Never touched the millions of BTC in his wallet again. Meanwhile, Finney was diagnosed with ALS in August 2009. The disease gradually worsened: first the fingers, then the arms, legs, and the whole body. By the end of 2010, he was in very bad shape. Coincidence? Impossible to know.

What we do know is that Finney continued contributing even fully paralyzed, using eye-tracking to program. His last project was software to enhance the security of Bitcoin wallets. Then, in 2013, he chose cryogenics. Hal Finney frozen, waiting for future medicine to bring him back to see what Bitcoin had become.

Satoshi disappeared into the depths of the internet. His 1 million BTC have never been touched. Some see this as proof that he didn’t create Bitcoin out of greed, but out of conviction. Finney left behind something that still moves people: “Technology can be used to free and protect people, not to control them.” He wrote this in 1992, 17 years before Bitcoin was born.

If someday medicine manages to wake Finney up, what would he think of today’s crypto world? Nobody knows. But one thing is certain: without him, Bitcoin might never have left the paper. Two figures who crossed paths at the right moment, testing a crypto experiment ignored until they managed to launch it. Without witnesses, without applause. Just two computers quietly running somewhere on the internet. The rest is history.