BREAKDOWN: Hal Finney’s ‘Bitcoin and Me’
CoinDesk Podcast Network
CoinDesk
4.8 • 689 Ratings
🗓️ 21 March 2021
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A reading of a touching BitcoinTalk post by the late Hal Finney, from exactly eight years ago.
This episode is sponsored by Nexo.io and Casper, and this week’s special product launch, NEM.
On this edition of “Long Reads Sunday,” NLW reads a BitcoinTalk forum from exactly eight years ago - Hal Finney’s “Bitcoin and Me.” The piece is about the origins of Bitcoin, and more broadly, life’s treasures.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. |
| 0:09.1 | It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world. |
| 0:15.2 | The breakdown is sponsored by nexo.io, Casper, and NEM, and produced and distributed by CoinDesk. |
| 0:22.5 | What's going on, guys? It is Sunday, March 31st, and that means it's time for Long Reads Sunday. |
| 0:29.4 | The origin story of Bitcoin is legendary at this point. So many of us have imagined this moment |
| 0:37.0 | where Satoshi presses send on that email, |
| 0:40.2 | letting the cypherpunks mailing list know about this new invention of his, |
| 0:45.0 | then watching that thing grow and grow and grow into something that is bigger than him, |
| 0:49.8 | bigger than the cypherpunks, bigger than anything anyone could have imagined. In truth, however, |
| 0:55.2 | when he pressed send on that first email, he was received with quite a bit of skepticism, |
| 1:01.4 | more skepticism, I think, than our imagination normally has it. Here's how Hal Finney put it in 2013. |
| 1:09.0 | When Satoshi announced Bitcoin on the cryptography mailing list, he got a |
| 1:12.4 | skeptical reception at best. Cryptographers have seen too many grand schemes by clueless nobs. |
| 1:18.0 | They tend to have a knee-jerk reaction. Indeed, the exception to that was, in fact, Howell |
| 1:23.1 | Finney. Howe was the second developer hired for Phil Zimmerman's PGP Corporation, |
| 1:28.6 | which was one of the most important companies in the early history of encryption, PGP, of course, standing for pretty good privacy. |
| 1:34.6 | Hal began corresponding with Satoshi and in fact became the first person ever to receive a Bitcoin |
| 1:39.2 | transaction. On January 10, 2009, he tweeted the famous two-word tweet, running Bitcoin. |
| 1:46.0 | The excellent documenting Bitcoin account on Friday shared a post of Howls from March 19, 2013, |
| 1:53.1 | eight years ago, exactly. |
| 1:55.3 | The post is called Bitcoin and Me, and in honor of the anniversary, I thought it would be |
| 1:59.0 | great to read it here. |
... |
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