30 August 2014

R.I.P. Hal Finney ~ Cryptocoder Extropian...

WIRED's Andy Greenberg writes Bitcoin’s Earliest Adopter Is Cryonically Freezing His Body to See the Future...
"Hal Finney, the renowned cryptographer, coder, and bitcoin pioneer, died Thursday morning at the age of 58 after five years battling ALS. He will be remembered for a remarkable career that included working as the number-two developer on the groundbreaking encryption software PGP in the early 1990s, creating one of the first “remailers” that presaged the anonymity software Tor, and -- more than a decade later -- becoming one of the first programmers to work on bitcoin’s open source code; in 2009, he received the very first bitcoin transaction from Satoshi Nakamoto. Now Finney has become an early adopter of a far more science fictional technology: human cryopreservation, the process of freezing human bodies so that they can be revived decades or even centuries later." [...] Fran Finney says that her husband had no illusions about the certainty of his resurrection. But until his final moments, he put his faith in the progress of technology. “He never said to me, ‘I will come back.’ But he told me, ‘I hope to be back.’"
Photographer Max Gerber captured Hal and Fran last year... http://www.wired.com/2014/08/hal-finney/

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