Hal Finney on digital cash traceability.
2020 01 02

Hal wrote about digital cash and traceability in 1994 on the Cypherpunk Mailing List:

…"the political point is that if you can make an untraceable payment, you could be coerced into doing so, for example by being robbed at gunpoint. Contrariwise, if the cash system used by you and your bank is such that all money is inherently traceable, it will be a lot harder to commit robbery, extortion, kidnapping, and all those other horrors which people fear will come with digital cash."

https://breakingsatoshi.substack.com/p/hal-finney-on-digital-cash-traceability

Bitcoin v0.1 released
"Hal Finney" Sun, 11 Jan 2009 10:22:14 -0800
https://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg10152.html


Download link:
> http://downloads.sourceforge.net/bitcoin/bitcoin-0.1.0.rar

2009-01-11 from Hal https://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/bitcoin-list/?viewmonth=200901

Cryptography Mailing List
November 2008 Archives by author
Starting: Nov 2 2008
Ending: Nov 29 2008

https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2008-November/author.html#14858

"It's interesting that the system can be configured to only allow a certain maximum number of coins ever to be generated. I guess the idea is that the amount of work needed to generate a new coin will become more difficult as time goes on.

One immediate problem with any new currency is how to value it. Even ignoring the practical problem that virtually no one will accept it at first, there is still a difficulty in coming up with a reasonable argument in favor of a particular non-zero value for the coins.

As an amusing thought experiment, imagine that Bitcoin is successful and becomes the dominant payment system in use throughout the world. Then the total value of the currency should be equal to the total value of all the wealth in the world. Current estimates of total worldwide household wealth that I have found range from $100 trillion to $300 trillion. With 20 million coins, that gives each coin a value of about $10 million.

So the possibility of generating coins today with a few cents of compute time may be quite a good bet, with a payoff of something like 100 million to 1! Even if the odds of Bitcoin succeeding to this degree are slim, are they really 100 million to one against? Something to think about..."

Hal

The Cryptography Mailing List
Bitcoin v0.1 released
Hal Finney hal at finney.org
Sat Jan 10 21:22:01 EST 2009
https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2009-January/015004.html

Shamir secret sharing and information theoretic security Hal Finney
Mon Feb 23 14:30:16 EST 2009
https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2009-February/015183.html

Hal Finney’s Proposal for Optimizing Bitcoin to be Enabled in Bitcoin Core - The BTC Times
https://www.btctimes.com/news/hal-finneys-proposal-for-optimizing-bitcoin-to-be-enabled-in-bitcoin-core

"Today, a patent involving the acceleration of cryptographic operations on elliptic curves has expired. Invented by Gallant, Lambert, and Vanstone, this technique is commonly referred to as GLV Endomorphism and can now be activated in Bitcoin Core in order to improve the speed and efficiency of Bitcoin’s signature verification.

...Since then, the feature has been implemented in Bitcoin Core but has yet to be enabled due to the existing patent around the cryptography that was filed on December 23rd, 1999"

https://www.btctimes.com/news/hal-finneys-proposal-for-optimizing-bitcoin-to-be-enabled-in-bitcoin-core

Darrel Hankerson
Alfred Menezes
Scott Vanstone

Guide to Elliptic
Curve Cryptography
2004.pdf

Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper

Hal Finney hal at finney.org
Fri Nov 7 07:40:12 PST 2008

https://lists.cpunks.org/pipermail/cypherpunks-legacy/2008-November/155312.html

bitcoin

Hal Finney hal.finney at gmail.com
Tue Jan 27 15:29:32 PST 2009

"I've been running it for a couple of weeks now, with about 2000 Bitcoins generated (each successful generation gives 50 Bitcoins). I wrote a somewhat tongue in cheek article on the cryptography list estimating that each Bitcoin could be worth ten million dollars, so this is quite a haul :). (Actually that same reasoning implies that gold should be worth about $10K per ounce, so maybe it's not so many orders of magnitude off.) "

https://lists.cpunks.org/pipermail/cypherpunks-legacy/2009-January/156150.html

Papel de efectivo electrónico P2P de Bitcoin
Hal Finney hal finney.org Vie 7 de noviembre 07:40:12 PST 2008

https://lists.cpunks.org/pipermail/cypherpunks-legacy/2008-November/155312.html

Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper. por Hal Finney
(Correo del 7/Nov/2008)
https://es.ramonquesada.com/espanol-es/bitcoin-p2p-por-hal-finney/

Copyright (c) 2008 Satoshi Nakamoto

Bitcoin source from November 2008.
December 23, 2013, 07:30:00 PM
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=382374.0

Dying Outside
by HalFinney5th Oct 200988 comments
240
MedicineBiologyHuman BodiesLife ExtensionDeathCommunity
Frontpage
A man goes in to see his doctor, and after some tests, the doctor says, "I'm sorry, but you have a fatal disease."

Man: "That's terrible! How long have I got?"

Doctor: "Ten."

Man: "Ten? What kind of answer is that? Ten months? Ten years? Ten what?"

The doctor looks at his watch. "Nine."

Recently I received some bad medical news (although not as bad as in the joke). Unfortunately I have been diagnosed with a fatal disease, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis or ALS, sometimes called Lou Gehrig's disease. ALS causes nerve damage, progressive muscle weakness and paralysis, and ultimately death. Patients lose the ability to talk, walk, move, eventually even to breathe, which is usually the end of life. This process generally takes about 2 to 5 years.

There are however two bright spots in this picture. The first is that ALS normally does not affect higher brain functions. I will retain my abilities to think and reason as usual. Even as my body is dying outside, I will remain alive inside.

The second relates to survival. Although ALS is generally described as a fatal disease, this is not quite true. It is only mostly fatal. When breathing begins to fail, ALS patients must make a choice. They have the option to either go onto invasive mechanical respiration, which involves a tracheotomy and breathing machine, or they can die in comfort. I was very surprised to learn that over 90% of ALS patients choose to die. And even among those who choose life, for the great majority this is an emergency decision made in the hospital during a medical respiratory crisis. In a few cases the patient will have made his wishes known in advance, but most of the time the procedure is done as part of the medical management of the situation, and then the ALS patient either lives with it or asks to have the machine disconnected so he can die. Probably fewer than 1% of ALS patients arrange to go onto ventilation when they are still in relatively good health, even though this provides the best odds for a successful transition.

With mechanical respiration, survival with ALS can be indefinitely extended. And the great majority of people living on respirators say that their quality of life is good and they are happy with their decision. (There may be a selection effect here.) It seems, then, that calling ALS a fatal disease is an oversimplification. ALS takes away your body, but it does not take away your mind, and if you are determined and fortunate, it does not have to take away your life.

There are a number of practical and financial obstacles to successfully surviving on a ventilator, foremost among them the great load on caregivers. No doubt this contributes to the high rates of choosing death. But it seems that much of the objection is philosophical. People are not happy about being kept alive by machines. And they assume that their quality of life would be poor, without the ability to move and participate in their usual activities. This is despite the fact that most people on respirators describe their quality of life as acceptable to good. As we have seen in other contexts, people are surprisingly poor predictors of how they will react to changed circumstances. This seems to be such a case, contributing to the high death rates for ALS patients.

I hope that when the time comes, I will choose life. ALS kills only motor neurons, which carry signals to the muscles. The senses are intact. And most patients retain at least some vestige of control over a few muscles, which with modern technology can offer a surprisingly effective mode of communication. Stephen Hawking, the world's longest surviving ALS patient at over 40 years since diagnosis, is said to be able to type at ten words per minute by twitching a cheek muscle. I hope to be able to read, browse the net, and even participate in conversations by email and messaging. Voice synthesizers allow local communications, and I am making use of a free service for ALS patients which will create a synthetic model of my own natural voice, for future use. I may even still be able to write code, and my dream is to contribute to open source software projects even from within an immobile body. That will be a life very much worth living. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bshZiaLefDejvPKuS/dying-outside

Hal Finney: Dying Outside R.A. Hettinga https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2009-October/015825.html

Why I Don't Use PGP...
Hal 74076.1041 at CompuServe.COM
Sat Oct 31 09:42:14 PST 1992
https://lists.cpunks.org/pipermail/cypherpunks-legacy/1992-October/000628.html

Electronic Banking
Hal Finney ghsvax!hal at uunet.UU.NET
Wed Nov 25 13:04:57 PST 1992
https://lists.cpunks.org/pipermail/cypherpunks-legacy/1992-November/000876.html

Previously Unpublished Emails of Satoshi Nakamoto Present a New Puzzle
https://www.coindesk.com/satoshi-nakamoto-hal-finney-emails

The emails between Satoshi and Hal Finney come from Bitcoin’s earliest days. They show how closely the cryptocurrency’s creator collaborated with early supporters at the time.