Jameson Lopp, the investigator, compiled archived emails from 2010 and data from a 10-mile race in California in 2009, among other evidence, to support his claim.
Newly discovered evidence indicates that Bitcoin pioneer Hal Finney was competing in a 10-mile race at the same time Satoshi Nakamoto was responding to emails and conducting Bitcoin transactions.
For years, it has been widely believed that the late computer scientist Hal Finney was the inventor of Bitcoin.
He was the first individual other than Satoshi to download and run Bitcoin’s software and the first person to receive Bitcoin.
However, Finney denied the theory until his death in 2014.
Even self-proclaimed cypherpunk and co-founder of Bitcoin custody firm Casa, Jameson Lopp, does not trust the speculation.
In a blog post dated October 21, Lopp presented new evidence casting further doubt on the theory.
The primary piece of evidence presented by Lopp concerns a 10-mile race held in Santa Barbara, California, on Saturday, April 18, 2009.
Finney participated in the “Santa Barbara Running Company Chardonnay 10 Miler & 5K,” commencing at 8 a.m. Pacific time and finishing in 78 minutes, according to the race results.
However, the competition coincides with timestamped emails between Satoshi and Mike Hearn, one of the first Bitcoin developers.
“It turns out that early Bitcoin developer Mike Hearn was emailing back and forth with Satoshi during this time,” explained Lopp, referring to archived emails that Hearn had released publicly in the past.
“What can we determine from all of this? Satoshi sent the email to Mike at 9:16 AM Pacific time – 2 minutes before Hal crossed the finish line.”
“For the hour and 18 minutes that Hal was running, we can be quite sure that he was not interacting with a computer,” Lopp added.
In the meantime, Lopp highlighted on-chain data that supports his claim further.
The communications between Hearn and Nakamoto reveal that Nakamoto sent Hearn 32.5 BTC in a single transaction.
Lopp referred to a transaction that occurred on block 11,408, which was mined at 8:55 a.m. local time in California — 55 minutes into Finney’s race.
This transaction, along with another involving 50 BTC, was validated by Nakamoto in an email sent at 6:16 p.m., which Lopp confirms occurred while Finney was still running.
Meanwhile, analysis has revealed that Satoshi was writing code and posting on various forums at a time when Hal Finney’s battle with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) had already impaired his ability to use a keyboard.
Fran Finney, Hal Finney’s ex-wife, posted on August 22, 2010, that the couple attended the 2010 Singularity Summit in San Francisco on August 14-15 and that Finney’s battle with ALS delayed his typing speed from “rapid-fire” 120 words per minute to “sluggish finger peck.”
Between August 14 and 15, 2010, Nakamoto performed four code check-ins and wrote seventeen forum posts, according to Lopp.
Lopp also identified a number of distinctions between Finney’s Reusable Proofs of Work code and the original Bitcoin client code.
However, Lopp acknowledged that there could be objections to the purported evidence.
Hearn published the emails in 2017 — seven years after the fact — and stated that it was around this time that other Bitcoiners lost trust in him due to disagreements about scaling Bitcoin.
Lopp stated that Finney could have scripted the emails and transactions in advance, or there could have been multiple Satoshi Nakamotos.
However, according to Lopp, Bitcoin was created by a single developer:
“In all my time researching Satoshi, I’ve yet to come across any evidence suggesting it was a group. If it was a group, then they all operated on the same sleep schedule, consistent across code commits, emails, and forum posts.”
Hal Finney passed on in August 2014 due to complications associated with ALS.
