In December 2022, Martin Shkreli published a cryptographically signed message using the private key belonging to Hal Finney's original Bitcoin address — the address that received the very first Bitcoin transaction ever made, on 12 January 2009.
The message reads: "This Transaction was made by Paul Leroux to Hal Finney on January 12, 2009 #bitcoin."
The cryptographic signature has been independently verified as valid. Whoever signed it held Hal Finney's private key.
The standard dismissal is that the signing method post-dates 2009. That is technically accurate on a narrow point — and it misses the real question. A witness does not have to record their testimony at the moment the event occurs. The question is not when the signing method existed. The question is who held that key, and why they used it to say what they said.
The Finney family have not repudiated the message. They maintained that silence through a year of extortion threats, a swatting incident, and an FBI investigation. That silence is not nothing.
A small community called the Nakamoto Attribution Project has been examining this question seriously, following the evidence honestly, and inviting both believers and sceptics to look carefully. The full investigative trail — including the portrait of Satoshi drawn from the public record, the known facts of Paul Calder Le Roux, and where the two portraits meet — is available here:
This forum is where Bitcoin was born. It is the right place to ask this question. Has this message received the serious examination it deserves?
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OTQDQaMFEgNpyHPEOXu-QAZpcp7ZWwYv/view?usp=drive_link
