Hal Finney

A graduate of the California Institute of Technology, Mr. Finney was a longtime futurist who put his programming skills to work in the service of his ideals, particularly his desire to see the privacy of individuals protected. After graduating from Caltech in 1979 with a degree in engineering, he worked for a company that developed video games like Astroblast and Space Attack. In 1991, he began doing volunteer work for a new software project known as Pretty Good Privacy, or P.G.P., and immediately became one of the central players in developing the program. P.G.P. aimed to make it possible for people everywhere to encrypt electronic communication in a way that could not be read by anyone other than the intended recipient. The program used relatively new innovations in encryption that are still thought to be invulnerable to code breakers. The original author of P.G.P., Philip R. Zimmermann, quickly became the target of federal prosecutors, who believed that the software broke United States laws against exporting military-grade encryption software. Mr. Finney played a more quiet role in P.G.P. to avoid becoming a target himself. Mr. Zimmermann said in an interview that this decision meant Mr. Finney did not get proper credit for some of the important innovations he had made in the development of P.G.P. When the investigation concluded in 1996 without any charges being filed, P.G.P. became a company, and Mr. Zimmermann set out to hire Mr. Finney as his first employee. Mr. Finney remained an employee of the P.G.P. Corporation until his retirement in 2011, working from his home in Santa Barbara, Calif. While working on P.G.P., Mr. Finney was a regular participant in a number of futurist mailing lists, the most famous of which gave birth to the Cypherpunk movement, dedicated to privacy-enhancing cryptography. He quickly saw the promise of the Bitcoin project when it was announced on an obscure email list in 2008 by a creator with the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. His early work on Bitcoin and his programming background led to frequent speculation in the Bitcoin community that Mr. Finney was Satoshi Nakamoto, a claim he always denied. Mr. Finney had been paralyzed by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S., and was taken off life support at Paradise Valley Hospital. His body was immediately prepared for cryonic preservation by the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Ariz., according to his wishes. Besides his son, Jason, and his wife Fran, he is survived by a daughter, Erin Finney; two sisters, Kathleen Finney and Patricia Wolf; and a brother, Michael. His wife, a physical therapist whom he met at Caltech, spent most of her days caring for him in his final years.