Hal Finney was pronounced legally deceased on August 28, 2014, at 8:50 AM, in Scottsdale, Arizona. He was 58. The cause was complications of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, diagnosed in 2009, the same year he received the first bitcoin transaction. Within hours of legal death he became Alcor patient A-1436 and was cryopreserved whole-body, per arrangements he had maintained with the foundation for over twenty years.
The death is the artifact. Finney, the life, belongs to a different kind of writing. The artifact is what the death did to the documents Finney had already produced — and specifically to one of them.
On January 11, 2009, eight days after the genesis block was mined, Finney posted a message that read in full: Running bitcoin. Two words. The catalog has its own entry on the tweet. What the catalog did not have, until August 28, 2014, was the second half of that artifact: the recontextualization. Running Bitcoin was, on January 11, 2009, a status update from an early adopter testing software his friend Satoshi Nakamoto had written. After August 28, 2014, it became something else. It became prophecy in retrospect. It became elegy. It became the line that bitcoiners would screenshot and reshare for the next decade as shorthand for a particular kind of early belief — quiet, technical, casual, absent of evangelism, present at the founding.
The biographical facts matter only in service of the artifact. Finney was the second developer hired by Phil Zimmermann at PGP Corporation. He built the first cryptographically based anonymous remailer. In 2004 he created the first reusable proof-of-work system. He received ten bitcoins from Satoshi on January 12, 2009. When he was diagnosed with ALS later that year, he was training for a marathon. He kept contributing to bitcoin development from his wheelchair, using eye-tracking software, until he could no longer communicate. He had told Alcor that when that happened, he wished to be allowed to cease functioning and promptly cryopreserved.
His wife Fran flew with him to Scottsdale by air ambulance on August 26. The Alcor standby team was waiting. After family goodbyes, his ventilator was disconnected. Doctors expected the end within hours. He breathed on his own for thirty-eight hours. He was pronounced dead Thursday morning. Alcor began the cryopreservation procedure within minutes.
The bitcoin community, which by 2014 had survived Mt. Gox and was three years into the Dark Forest era, donated to Finneys cryonics costs in BTC. Alcor accepted the donations and converted them to fiat. The price of bitcoin on the day of his death was $510.
The cryopreservation is not the artifact either. The artifact is the moment when the entire community understood, simultaneously, that the first person to receive a bitcoin transaction would not see what bitcoin became. That the documents he left behind — the code commits, the forum posts, the two-word tweet — were now closed. That whatever he had thought was going to happen, he had thought it from inside the founding, and would not be available to confirm or revise.
The protocol succeeded at its first real test. Its first user did not.