Hal your work touched people around the world, as a fan of PGP and as the second ever user of Bitcoin I respect you and hope that you awaken as an android in the future to see how far we have been able to evolve humanity.
In my mind you are as close to Satoshi as we will know.
RIP Hal and may your cryogenic sleep be well deserved and may you smile on us from above, the true early adopter even in death.
http://www.wired.com/2014/08/hal-finney/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.
Just after his legal death was declared Thursday at 9 a.m., Finney’s body was flown to a facility of the cryonics firm known as the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona. As of Thursday night, Finney’s blood and other fluids were being removed from his body and slowly replaced with a collection of chemicals that Alcor calls M-22, which the company says are designed to be as minimally toxic as possible to his tissues while preventing the formation of ice crystals that would result from freezing and destroy his cell membranes.
Over the next few days, the temperature of his body will be slowly lowered to -320 degrees Fahrenheit. Eventually, it will be stored in an aluminum pod inside a 10-foot tall tank filled with 450 liters of liquid nitrogen designed to keep him in that state of near-complete suspended animation. “That’s where he’ll remain until such time as we have technologies to repair the problems he had such as ALS and the aging process,” says Max More, Alcor’s director and Finney’s friend of many years. “And then we can bring Hal back happy and whole again.”
Finney, like Alcor’s president More, was an active member of the Extropians, a movement of technologists and futurists focused on transhumanism and life extension. “He’s always been optimistic about the future,” says Fran. “Every new advance, he embraced it, every new technology. Hal relished life, and he made the most of everything.”
Truly a trailblazer.
