Hal Finney, a well-known and respected figure in the field of cryptography and one of the earliest figures in the world of Bitcoin, passed away yesterday morning at the age of 58.
He had been suffering from the ongoing affects of ALS since 2009 when he was first diagnosed.
As part of his beliefs, Hal Finney has been cryopreserved by the Alcor Foundation in the hopes that a method of curing ALS and reviving him would be found in the future.
Hal arrived in Scottsdale, Arizona, where the Alcor Foundation is based, on Tuesday. A statement from the Alcor Foundation’s Max More, PhD, describes the scenario from there.
After administration of drugs to ensure no consciousness, his ventilator was removed. Although the doctors exepcted all breathing to cease within an hour, Hal’s body kept going until shortly before 9:00 am this morning, August 28, 2014.
While this is certainly a sad time for those close to Hal Finney, the process is in accordance with his wishes that he did not want to remain hooked up to a life support machine, and once he lost the ability to communicate he should be allowed to pass away naturally.
Once Hal was pronounced legally dead, “Alcor’s standby team went into action, restoring circulation, ventilation, administering an array of medications, and initiating external cooling.” The cryopreservation process is quite involved.
Surgery is currently underway to enable us to replace Hal’s blood and interstitial fluids with cryoprotectant. Once perfusion is finished we will be able to plunge Hal’s temperature down past the freezing point without any significant ice formation. Once he is down to around -110 degC we will slow cooling and take a couple more days to reach the final storage temperature of -196 degC. After that, Hal will be placed in long-term storage and cared for until the day when repair and revival may be possible.
Remembering Hal
Hal Finney was a video game developer in his earlier years before getting more involved in the cryptography community.
One of his most notable accomplishments was creating the first reusable proof of work system in 2004, years before Bitcoin. And once Bitcoin was born, Hal was the recipient of the first transaction, from sender Satoshi Nakamoto.
Gavin Andresen, another of Satoshi’s early collaborators, posted this simple tweet in Hal’s honour.
Farewell Hal, and thank you.
— Gavin Andresen (@gavinandresen) August 28, 2014
About Alcor
The Alcor Life Extension Foundation is a nonprofit organization which preserves human beings after death.
The idea is that in the future, medical science may advance to the point where the dead may be revived, debilitating diseases like ALS may be cured, and those afflicted by them may return to live normal happy lives.
The organization began accepting Bitcoin donations through BitPay in June of this year.
Hal Finney Has Been Cryopreserved
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