I've seen a few posts recently about Hal finney and his contributions to cryptography and the cypherpunk communities which is undeniable, Finney was a genius. Who inspired him?

Who is Chaum?

David Lee Chaum is seldomly spoken about he is THE pioneer of blockchain technology. Some refer to him as the grandfather of the blockchain.

It is his 1985 paper that fueled the fire in many young cryptographers and cypherpunks and gave them something to work towards, a vision.

The paper that started it all.

The earliest documented mention of crypto by Hal Finney is in an email communication dated november 15th 1992, where he writes about Chaums work. It seems chaums views align with his own and he becomes fascinated by the systems chaum describes in his paper "Security without identification: transaction systems to make big brother obsolete"

Read the paper here - https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/4372.4373

It is this very paper that sparked finneys interest in digital payment systems, fast forward 16 years Satoshi Nakamoto publishes the white paper and btc mainnet goes live. Due to his interest in crypto payment systems hal finds himself among the very first people to validate for the network and ends up mining the 70th block on the bitcoin network with just his cpu.

Many of Hal Finneys email communications throughout the early to late 90s express the need to remove the power from the governments and corporations and give it back to the people, his vision was to start and I quote "a grass roots movement" where the people take back control over their own finances, data and privacy, through anonymity.

"The computer could be used as a tool to liberate and protect the people, rather than to control them" - Hal Finney

A page taken out of Chaums blueprint for a self governed future.

Therefore I strongly believe if it was Hal Finneys Bitcoin, it would be closer to a Monero for the privacy factor alone.

Judging by Finneys final forum post, I would say not even Hal Finney knows who Satoshi really was.

Guess we'll have to wait to ask him when he comes out of the cryogenic chamber.