Bitcoin developer Satoshi Nakamoto could have died 9 years ago

Today marks the 9th anniversary of the death of the first bitcoin owner, Hal Finney. It was to him that Bitcoin developer Сатоші Накамото" href="https://noworries.media/biography/satoshi-nakamoto/" data-bio-id="4232">Satoshi Nakamoto sent 10 BTC on January 12, 2009. According to one version, it was Finney who could have been hiding behind Satoshi Nakamoto’s image.

14 years ago, Hal Finney posted on his Twitter page about launching a node of the flagship cryptocurrency on his own PC, writing: «Running bitcoin». The programmer’s historic post became extremely popular, receiving tens of thousands of likes and shares.

Throughout his career, the developer has been interested in cryptography and data encryption. He also worked on his own projects in this area. For example, Finney developed a program for sending anonymous emails and the Proof-of-Work system.

Despite his close relationship with Satoshi, during his lifetime, Finney denied the assumption that he created bitcoin. According to the developer, he only communicated with Nakamoto and gave him advice. The developers met online. It is known that they communicated via emails. Nakamoto was interested in communicating with Finney because the developer helped the Bitcoin creator solve programming problems.

In October 2009, Finney was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. The developer announced this in his blog on the LessWrong platform. The disease confined the programmer to a wheelchair. Satoshi Nakamoto stopped communicating around the same time as Finney due to the disease.

Crypto community members also noticed the similarity in the way Finney and Nakamoto corresponded. For example, both programmers often put a double space at the end of a sentence. To prove that Satoshi Nakamoto was a different person, Finney even published his correspondence with the VTS developer.

As a reminder, Satoshi Nakamoto disappeared from the public space back in April 2011 and has not been seen since, so there are speculations that he is dead. There is also a theory that an entire development team is behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. Before his disappearance, Nakamoto claimed to be Japanese, born on April 5, 1975. However, he was very fluent in English, so many believed him to be a resident of an English-speaking country.