Hal Finney Used Macs, Satoshi Did Not

Much speculation has formed about the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, with no conclusive evidence for any of the candidates. However, now the Twitter posts from one of the most popular candidates, Hal Finney, has some individuals ruling out the possibility that Finney could be Nakamoto.

In a CoinTelegraph interview held on May 26, Laszlo Hanyecz, colloquially known as the “Bitcoin Pizza Guys”, told the media outlet that Bitcoin didn’t originally work on Mac and that Satoshi had asked him to work on the releases for the MacOS. This was because Satoshi didn’t own a Mac and didn’t know how build it for the OS.

The Twitter posts in question come from June 2010, which proves Finney was a user of the Mac,

So if Satoshi didn’t have a Mac, that would put Finney out of the candidature as there’s proof that Finney did own one. 

However, this is not compelling evidence, only very much circumstantial. Things become even murkier when you consider the possibility that Satoshi Nakamoto could be a group of people, or perhaps just outsourced some of the agenda. 

Many in the cryptocurrency community have narrowed down their list of candidates to Nick Szabo, Hal Finney and Wei Dai. Several reasons have been put forward as to why these candidates are most likely the Bitcoin (BTC) creator, namely their experience in cryptography and computer science.

Cardano (ADA) founder Charles Hoskinson believes that Blockstream CEO and co-founder Adam Back “ticks many of the boxes” for being Satoshi Nakamoto and suggests code stylometry could help in the identification.