I’ve been thinking about a question recently: how many people truly understand Bitcoin’s early history? I’ve found that many people don’t even know the name Hal Finney, but he may be one of the most underrated figures in the entire crypto world.

It sounds a bit surreal. On August 28, 2014, Hal Finney left this world, but his story is far from over. His remains are preserved in a cryogenic facility in Arizona, stored in liquid nitrogen, waiting for future technology to bring him back. This sounds like science fiction, but it really happened.

Why is Hal Finney so important? Because he was the first person to receive Bitcoin after Satoshi Nakamoto. On January 3, 2009, Satoshi launched Bitcoin. Just 9 days later, Satoshi sent Hal Finney 10 BTC—this was the very first transaction on the entire network. At that time, there were only two people on the whole network: Satoshi and Hal. Now Bitcoin’s market cap has long surpassed the trillion-dollar mark, but it all began with a conversation between these two geniuses.

Hal Finney himself was a cryptography genius. In 2009, he was already 53 years old. After reading the Bitcoin white paper, he immediately recognized its revolutionary significance. He didn’t just download the software—he also directly participated in Bitcoin’s development and bug fixes. His role was crucial to Bitcoin’s survival and growth. But in that same year, Finney was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). The disease gradually took away control of his body, and he died 5 years later.

Here’s an intriguing mystery that has long baffled the community. During his lifetime, Hal Finney repeatedly denied that he was Satoshi Nakamoto. In 2013, even though he was nearly paralyzed, he still wrote on Bitcoin forums, saying, "I am not Satoshi." He even publicly shared his email correspondence with Satoshi to prove it. But coincidentally, in 2014, Newsweek claimed it had found Satoshi—a Japanese-American man named Dorian Nakamoto who lived in Temple City. What happened in the end? Hal Finney also lived in the same city, just a few streets away. Did he borrow the name of a Japanese neighbor to create this mystery? And the time when Satoshi mysteriously disappeared in 2011 happened to line up with the period when Finney’s health rapidly deteriorated. Was it illness that made him go silent?

Even more interestingly, Finney had been thinking about similar questions long before Bitcoin appeared. In 2004—4 years before Bitcoin was born—he developed a system called RPOW, which solved exactly the same problem Bitcoin later solved: how to prevent double-spending of digital currency without needing a central authority. This wasn’t just an early user—he was a true cryptography genius, an advocate for financial privacy, and a fighter pushing back against government surveillance of encryption.

12 years have passed, and many people still don’t know Hal Finney’s name. But within the Bitcoin community, he’s revered as an OG—Original Gangster—a real pioneer who helped contribute to the birth of a system that changed the world. Maybe Finney was Satoshi, maybe he wasn’t. But one thing is certain: he is part of the legend, and his legacy lives on in every block of the Bitcoin blockchain. Now that the BTC price is trading around $79.49K, every transaction continues the story he helped pioneer.