Great technology opens up an universe of possibilities.

Need a friend? WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, etc.

Traveling? AirBnB, Expedia, Google Flights, etc.

Money transfer? Use digital banking, e-wallet, or crypto applications

Products inspire us. How do we become great?

I asked product managers in my network:

What does it take to be a great product manager?

52 product managers from 40+ prominent IT businesses in Southeast Asia responded passionately. Many of the PMs I've worked with have built fantastic products, from unicorns (Lazada, Tokopedia, Ovo) to incumbents (Google, PayPal, Experian, WarnerMedia) to growing (etaily, Nium, Shipper).

TL;DR:

• Soft talents are more important than hard skills. Technical expertise was hardly ever stressed by product managers, and empathy was mentioned more than ten times. Janani from Xendit expertly recorded the moment. A superb PM must comprehend that their empathy for the feelings of their users must surpass all logic and data.

• Constant attention to the needs of the user. Many people concur that the closer a PM gets to their customer/user, the more likely it is that the conclusion will be better. There were almost 30 references to customers and users. Focusing on customers has the advantage because it is hard to overshoot, as Rajesh from Lazada puts it best.

• Setting priorities is invaluable. Prioritization is essential because there are so many problems that a PM must deal with every day. My favorite quotation on this is from Rakuten user Yee Jie. Viki, A competent product manager extinguishes fires. A good product manager lets things burn and then prioritizes.

This summary isn't enough to capture what excellent PMs claim it requires. Read below!

What qualities make a successful product manager?

Themed quotes are alphabetized by author.

Embrace your user/customer

Aeriel Dela Paz, Rainmaking Venture Architect, ex-GCash Product Head

Great PMs know what customers need even when they don’t say it directly. It’s about reading between the lines and going through the numbers to address that need.

Anders Nordahl, OrkestraSCS's Product Manager

Understanding the vision of your customer is as important as to get the customer to buy your vision

Angel Mendoza, MetaverseGo's Product Head

Most people think that to be a great product manager, you must have technical know-how. It’s textbook and I do think it is helpful to some extent, but for me the secret sauce is EMPATHY — the ability to see and feel things from someone else’s perspective. You can’t create a solution without deeply understanding the problem.

Senior Product Manager, Tokopedia

Focus on delivering value and helping people (consumer as well as colleague) and everything else will follow

Darren Lau, Deloitte Digital's Head of Customer Experience

Start with the users, and work backwards. Don’t have a solution looking for a problem

Darryl Tan, Grab Product Manager

I would say that a great product manager is able to identify the crucial problems to solve through strong user empathy and synthesis of insights

Diego Perdana, Kitalulus Senior Product Manager

I think to be a great product manager you need to be obsessed with customer problems and most important is solve the right problem with the right solution

Senior Product Manager, AirAsia

Lot of common sense + Customer Obsession. The most important role of a Product manager is to bring clarity of a solution. Your product is good if it solves customer problems. Your product is great if it solves an eco-system problem and disrupts the business in a positive way.

Edward Xie, Mastercard Managing Consultant, ex-Shopee Product Manager

Perfect your product, but be prepared to compromise for right users

AVP Product, Shipper

For me, a great product manager need to be rational enough to find the business opportunities while obsessing the customers.

Janani Gopalakrishnan is a senior product manager of a stealth firm.

While as a good PM it’s important to be data-driven, to be a great PM one needs to understand that their empathy for their users’ emotions must exceed all logic and data. Great PMs also make these product discussions thrive within the team by intently listening to all the members thoughts and influence the team’s skin in the game positively.

Director, Product Management, Indeed

Great product managers put their users first. They discover problems that matter most to their users and inspire their team to find creative solutions.

Grab's Senior Product Manager Lakshay Kalra

Product management is all about finding and solving most important user problems

Quipper's Mega Puji Saraswati

First of all, always remember the value of “user first” to solve what user really needs (the main problem) for guidance to arrange the task priority and develop new ideas. Second, ownership. Treat the product as your “2nd baby”, and the team as your “2nd family”. Third, maintain a good communication, both horizontally and vertically. But on top of those, always remember to have a work — life balance, and know exactly the priority in life :)

Senior Product Manager, Prosa.AI Miswanto Miswanto

A great Product Manager is someone who can be the link between customer needs with the readiness and flexibility of the team. So that it can provide, build, and produce a product that is useful and helps the community to carry out their daily activities. And He/She can improve product quality ongoing basis or continuous to help provide solutions for users or our customer.

Lead Product Manager, Tokopedia, Oriza Wahyu Utami

Be a great listener, be curious and be determined. every great product manager have the ability to listen the pain points and understand the problems, they are always curious on the users feedback, and they also very determined to look for the solutions that benefited users and the business.

99 Group CPO Rajesh Sangati

The advantage of focusing on customers: it’s impossible to overshoot

Ray Jang, founder of Scenius, formerly of ByteDance

The difference between good and great product managers is that great product managers are willing to go the unsexy and unglamorous extra mile by rolling up their sleeves and ironing out all minutiae details of the product such that when the user uses the product, they can’t help but say “This was made for me.”

BCG Digital Ventures' Sid Narayanan

Great product managers ensure that what gets built and shipped is at the intersection of what creates value for the customer and for the business that’s building the product…often times, especially in today’s highly liquid funding environment, the unit economics, aka ensuring that what gets shipped creates value for the business and is sustainable, gets overlooked

Stephanie Brownlee, BCG Digital Ventures Product Manager

There is software in the world that does more harm than good to people and society. Great Product Managers build products that solve problems not create problems

Experiment constantly

Delivery Hero's Abhishek Muralidharan

Embracing your failure is the key to become a great Product Manager

DeliveryHero's Anuraag Burman

Product Managers should be thick skinned to deal with criticism and the stomach to take risk and face failures.

DataSpark Product Head Apurva Lawale

Great product managers enjoy the creative process with their team to deliver intuitive user experiences to benefit users.

Dexter Zhuang, Xendit Product Manager

The key to creating winning products is building what customers want as quickly as you can — testing and learning along the way.

PayPal's Jay Ko

To me, great product managers always remain relentlessly curious. They are empathetic leaders and problem solvers that glean customer insights into building impactful products

Home Credit Philippines' Jedd Flores

Great Product Managers are the best dreamers; they think of what can be possible for the customers, for the company and the positive impact that it will have in the industry that they’re part of

Set priorities first, foremost, foremost.

HBO Go Product Manager Akshay Ishwar

Good product managers strive to balance the signal to noise ratio, Great product managers know when to turn the dials for each up exactly

Zuellig Pharma's Guojie Su

Have the courage to say no. Managing egos and request is never easy and rejecting them makes it harder but necessary to deliver the best value for the customers.

Ninja Van's John Prawira

(1) PMs should be able to ruthlessly prioritize. In order to be effective, PMs should anchor their product development process with their north stars (success metrics) and always communicate with a purpose. (2) User-first when validating assumptions. PMs should validate assumptions early and often to manage risk when leading initiatives with a focus on generating the highest impact to solving a particular user pain-point. We can’t expect a product/feature launch to be perfect (there might be bugs or we might not achieve our success metric — which is where iteration comes in), but we should try our best to optimize on user-experience earlier on.

Nium Product Manager Keika Sugiyama

I’d say a great PM holds the ability to balance ruthlessness and empathy at the same time. It’s easier said than done for sure!

ShopBack product manager Li Cai

Great product managers are like great Directors of movies. They do not create great products/movies by themselves. They deliver it by Defining, Prioritising, Energising the team to deliver what customers love.

Quincus' Michael Lim

A great product manager, keeps a pulse on the company’s big picture, identifies key problems, and discerns its rightful prioritization, is able to switch between the macro perspective to micro specifics, and communicates concisely with humility that influences naturally for execution

Mathieu François-Barseghian, SVP, Citi Ventures

“You ship your org chart”. This is Conway’s Law short version (1967!): the fundamental socio-technical driver behind innovation successes (Netflix) and failures (your typical bank). The hype behind micro-services is just another reflection of Conway’s Law

Mastercard's Regional Product Manager Nikhil Moorthy

A great PM should always look to build products which are scalable & viable , always keep the end consumer journey in mind. Keeping things simple & having a MVP based approach helps roll out products faster. One has to test & learn & then accordingly enhance / adapt, these are key to success

Rendy Andi, Tokopedia Product Manager

Articulate a clear vision and the path to get there, Create a process that delivers the best results and Be serious about customers.

Senior Product Manager, DANA Indonesia

Own the problem, not the solution — Great PMs are outstanding problem preventers. Great PMs are discerning about which problems to prevent, which problems to solve, and which problems not to solve

Tat Leong Seah, LionsBot International Senior UX Engineer, ex-ViSenze Product Manager

Prioritize outcomes for your users, not outputs of your system” or more succinctly “be agile in delivering value; not features”

Senior Product Manager, Rakuten Viki

A good product manager puts out fires. A great product manager lets fires burn and prioritize from there

acquire fundamental soft skills

Oracle NetSuite's Astrid April Dominguez

Personally, i believe that it takes grit, empathy, and optimistic mindset to become a great PM

Ovo Lead Product Manager Boy Al Idrus

Contrary to popular beliefs, being a great product manager doesn’t have anything to do with technicals, it sure plays a part but most important weapons are: understanding pain points of users, project management, sympathy in leadership and business critical skills; these 4 aspects would definitely help you to become a great product manager.

PwC Product Manager Eric Koh

Product managers need to be courageous to be successful. Courage is required to dive deep, solving big problems at its root and also to think far and dream big to achieve bold visions for your product

Ninja Van's Product Director

In my opinion the two most important ingredients to become a successful product manager is: 1. Strong critical thinking 2. Strong passion for the work. As product managers, we typically need to solve very complex problems where the answers are often very ambiguous. The work is tough and at times can be really frustrating. The 2 ingredients I mentioned earlier will be critical towards helping you to slowly discover the solution that may become a game changer.

PayPal's Lead Product Manager

A great PM has an eye of a designer, the brain of an engineer and the tongue of a diplomat

Product Manager Irene Chan

A great Product Manager is able to think like a CEO of the company. Visionary with Agile Execution in mind

Isabella Yamin, Rakuten Viki Product Manager

There is no one model of being a great product person but what I’ve observed from people I’ve had the privilege working with is an overflowing passion for the user problem, sprinkled with a knack for data and negotiation

Google product manager Jachin Cheng

Great product managers start with abundant intellectual curiosity and grow into a classic T-shape. Horizontally: generalists who range widely, communicate fluidly and collaborate easily cross-functionally, connect unexpected dots, and have the pulse both internally and externally across users, stakeholders, and ecosystem players. Vertically: deep product craftsmanship comes from connecting relentless user obsession with storytelling, business strategy with detailed features and execution, inspiring leadership with risk mitigation, and applying the most relevant tools to solving the right problems.

Jene Lim, Experian's Product Manager

3 Cs and 3 Rs. Critical thinking , Customer empathy, Creativity. Resourcefulness, Resilience, Results orientation.

Nirenj George, Envision Digital's Security Product Manager

A great product manager is someone who can lead, collaborate and influence different stakeholders around the product vision, and should be able to execute the product strategy based on customer insights, as well as take ownership of the product roadmap to create a greater impact on customers.

Grab's Lead Product Manager

Product Management is a multi-dimensional role that looks very different across each product team so each product manager has different challenges to deal with but what I have found common among great product managers is ability to create leverage through their efforts to drive outsized impacts for their products. This leverage is built using data with intuition, building consensus with stakeholders, empowering their teams and focussed efforts on needle moving work.

NCS Product Manager Umar Masagos

To be a great product manager, one must master both the science and art of Product Management. On one hand, you need have a strong understanding of the tools, metrics and data you need to drive your product. On the other hand, you need an in-depth understanding of your organization, your target market and target users, which is often the more challenging aspect to master.

M1 product manager Wei Jiao Keong

A great product manager is multi-faceted. First, you need to have the ability to see the bigger picture, yet have a keen eye for detail. Secondly, you are empathetic and is able to deliver products with exceptional user experience while being analytical enough to achieve business outcomes. Lastly, you are highly resourceful and independent yet comfortable working cross-functionally.

Yudha Utomo, ex-Senior Product Manager, Tokopedia

A great Product Manager is essentially an effective note-taker. In order to achieve the product goals, It is PM’s job to ensure objective has been clearly conveyed, efforts are assessed, and tasks are properly tracked and managed. PM can do this by having top-notch documentation skills.

Fixing problems isn't enough.

Numerous articles and how-to guides on value propositions focus on fixing consumer concerns.

Contrary to popular opinion, addressing customer pain rarely suffices. Win your market category too.

Core Value Statement

Value proposition usually means a product's main value.

Its how your product solves client problems. The product's core.

Answering these questions creates a relevant core value proposition:

• What tasks is your customer trying to complete? (Jobs for clients)

• How much discomfort do they feel while they perform this? (pains)

• What would they like to see improved or changed? (gains)

After that, you create products and services that alleviate those pains and give value to clients.

Value Proposition by Category

Your product belongs to a market category and must follow its regulations, regardless of its value proposition.

Creating a new market category is challenging. Fitting into customers' product perceptions is usually better than trying to change them.

New product users simplify market categories. Products are labeled.

Your product will likely be associated with a collection of products people already use.

Example: IT experts will use your communication and management app.

If your target clients think it's an advanced mail software, they'll compare it to others and expect things like:

• comprehensive calendar

• spam detectors

• adequate storage space

• list of contacts

• etc.

If your target users view your product as a task management app, things change. You can survive without a contact list, but not status management.

Find out what your customers compare your product to and if it fits your value offer. If so, adapt your product plan to dominate this market. If not, try different value propositions and messaging to put the product in the right context.

Finished Value Proposition

A comprehensive value proposition is when your solution addresses user problems and wins its market category.

Addressing simply the primary value proposition may produce a valuable and original product, but it may struggle to cross the chasm into the mainstream market. Meeting expectations is easier than changing views.

Without a unique value proposition, you will drown in the red sea of competition.

To conclude:

1. Find out who your target consumer is and what their demands and problems are.

2. To meet these needs, develop and test a primary value proposition.

3. Speak with your most devoted customers. Recognize the alternatives they use to compare you against and the market segment they place you in.

4. Recognize the requirements and expectations of the market category.

5. To meet or surpass category standards, modify your goods.

Great products solve client problems and win their category.

Decentralized perpetual may be the next crypto market boom; with tons of perpetual popping up, let's look at two protocols that offer organic, non-inflationary yields.

Decentralized derivatives exchanges' market share has increased tenfold in a year, but it's still 2% of CEXs'. DEXs have a long way to go before they can compete with centralized exchanges in speed, liquidity, user experience, and composability.

I'll cover gains.trade and GMX protocol in Polygon, Avalanche, and Arbitrum. Both protocols support leveraged perpetual crypto, stock, and Forex trading.

Why these protocols?

Decentralized GMX Gains protocol

Organic yield: path to sustainability

I've never trusted Defi's non-organic yields. Example: XYZ protocol. 20–75% of tokens may be set aside as farming rewards to provide liquidity, according to tokenomics.

Say you provide ETH-USDC liquidity. They advertise a 50% APR reward for this pair, 10% from trading fees and 40% from farming rewards. Only 10% is real, the rest is "Ponzi." The "real" reward is in protocol tokens.

Why keep this token? Governance voting or staking rewards are promoted services.

Most liquidity providers expect compensation for unused tokens. Basic psychological principles then? — Profit.

Nobody wants governance tokens. How many out of 100 care about the protocol's direction and will vote?

Staking increases your token's value. Currently, they're mostly non-liquid. If the protocol is compromised, you can't withdraw funds. Most people are sceptical of staking because of this.

"Free tokens," lack of use cases, and skepticism lead to tokens moving south. No farming reward protocols have lasted.

It may have shown strength in a bull market, but what about a bear market?

What is decentralized perpetual?

A perpetual contract is a type of futures contract that doesn't expire. So one can hold a position forever.

You can buy/sell any leveraged instruments (Long-Short) without expiration.

In centralized exchanges like Binance and coinbase, fees and revenue (liquidation) go to the exchanges, not users.

Users can provide liquidity that traders can use to leverage trade, and the revenue goes to liquidity providers.

Gains.trade and GMX protocol are perpetual trading platforms with a non-inflationary organic yield for liquidity providers.

GMX protocol

GMX is an Arbitrum and Avax protocol that rewards in ETH and Avax. GLP uses a fast oracle to borrow the "true price" from other trading venues, unlike a traditional AMM.

GLP and GMX are protocol tokens. GLP is used for leveraged trading, swapping, etc.

GLP is a basket of tokens, including ETH, BTC, AVAX, stablecoins, and UNI, LINK, and Stablecoins.

GLP composition on arbitrum

GLP composition on Avalanche

GLP token rebalances based on usage, providing liquidity without loss.

Protocol "runs" on Staking GLP. Depending on their chain, the protocol will reward users with ETH or AVAX. Current rewards are 22 percent (15.71 percent in ETH and the rest in escrowed GMX) and 21 percent (15.72 percent in AVAX and the rest in escrowed GMX). escGMX and ETH/AVAX percentages fluctuate.

Where is the yield coming from?

Swap fees, perpetual interest, and liquidations generate yield. 70% of fees go to GLP stakers, 30% to GMX. Organic yields aren't paid in inflationary farm tokens.

Escrowed GMX is vested GMX that unlocks in 365 days. To fully unlock GMX, you must farm the Escrowed GMX token for 365 days. That means less selling pressure for the GMX token.

GMX's status

These are the fees in Arbitrum in the past 11 months by GMX.

GMX works like a casino, which increases fees. Most fees come from Margin trading, which means most traders lose money; this money goes to the casino, or GLP stakers.

Strategies

My personal strategy is to DCA into GLP when markets hit bottom and stake it; GLP will be less volatile with extra staking rewards.

GLP YoY return vs. naked buying

Let's say I invested $10,000 in BTC, AVAX, and ETH in January.

• BTC price: 47665$

• ETH price: 3760$

• AVAX price: $145

Current prices

• BTC $21,000 (Down 56 percent )

• ETH $1233 (Down 67.2 percent )

• AVAX $20.36 (Down 85.95 percent )

Your $10,000 investment is now worth around $3,000.

How about GLP? My initial investment is 50% stables and 50% other assets ( Assuming the coverage ratio for stables is 50 percent at that time)

Without GLP staking yield, your value is $6500.

Let's assume the average APR for GLP staking is 23%, or $1500. So 8000$ total. It's 50% safer than holding naked assets in a bear market.

In a bull market, naked assets are preferable to GLP.

Short farming using GLP

Simple GLP short farming.

You use a stable asset as collateral to borrow AVAX. Sell it and buy GLP. Even if GLP rises, it won't rise as fast as AVAX, so we can get yields.

Let's do the maths

You deposit $10,000 USDT in Aave and borrow Avax. Say you borrow $8,000; you sell it, buy GLP, and risk 20%.

After a year, ETH, AVAX, and BTC rise 20%. GLP is $8800. $800 vanishes. 20% yields $1600. You're profitable. Shorting Avax costs $1600. (Assumptions-ETH, AVAX, BTC move the same, GLP yield is 20%. GLP has a 50:50 stablecoin/others ratio. Aave won't liquidate

In naked Avax shorting, Avax falls 20% in a year. You'll make $1600. If you buy GLP and stake it using the sold Avax and BTC, ETH and Avax go down by 20% - your profit is 20%, but with the yield, your total gain is $2400.

Issues with GMX

GMX's historical funding rates are always net positive, so long always pays short. This makes long-term shorts less appealing.

Oracle price discovery isn't enough. This limitation doesn't affect Bitcoin and ETH, but it affects less liquid assets. Traders can buy and sell less liquid assets at a lower price than their actual cost as long as GMX exists.

As users must provide GLP liquidity, adding more assets to GMX will be difficult. Next iteration will have synthetic assets.

Gains Protocol

Best leveraged trading platform. Smart contract-based decentralized protocol. 46 crypto pairs can be leveraged 5–150x and 10 Forex pairs 5–1000x. $10 DAI @ 150x (min collateral x leverage pos size is $1500 DAI). No funding fees, no KYC, trade DAI from your wallet, keep funds.

DAI single-sided staking and the GNS-DAI pool are important parts of Gains trading. GNS-DAI stakers get 90% of trading fees and 100% swap fees. 10 percent of trading fees go to DAI stakers, which is currently 14 percent!

Trade volume

When a trader opens a trade, the leverage and profit are pulled from the DAI pool. If he loses, the protocol yield goes to the stakers.

If the trader's win rate is high and the DAI pool slowly depletes, the GNS token is minted and sold to refill DAI. Trader losses are used to burn GNS tokens. 25%+ of GNS is burned, making it deflationary.

Due to high leverage and volatility of crypto assets, most traders lose money and the protocol always wins, keeping GNS deflationary.

Gains uses a unique decentralized oracle for price feeds, which is better for leverage trading platforms. Let me explain.

Gains uses chainlink price oracles, not its own price feeds. Chainlink oracles only query centralized exchanges for price feeds every minute, which is unsuitable for high-precision trading.

Gains created a custom oracle that queries the eight chainlink nodes for the current price and, on average, for trade confirmation. This model eliminates every-second inquiries, which waste gas but are more efficient than chainlink's per-minute price.

This price oracle helps Gains open and close trades instantly, eliminate scam wicks, etc.

Other benefits include:

• Stop-loss guarantee (open positions updated)

• No scam wicks

• Spot-pricing

• Highest possible leverage

• Fixed-spreads. During high volatility, a broker can increase the spread, which can hit your stop loss without the price moving.

• Trade directly from your wallet and keep your funds.

• >90% loss before liquidation (Some platforms liquidate as little as -50 percent)

• KYC-free

• Directly trade from wallet; keep funds safe

Further improvements

GNS-DAI liquidity providers fear the impermanent loss, so the protocol is migrating to its own liquidity and single staking GNS vaults. This allows users to stake GNS without permanent loss and obtain 90% DAI trading fees by staking. This starts in August.

Their upcoming improvements can be found here.

Gains constantly add new features and change pairs. It's an interesting protocol.

Conclusion

Next bull run, watch decentralized perpetual protocols. Effective tokenomics and non-inflationary yields may attract traders and liquidity providers. But still, there is a long way for them to develop, and I don't see them tackling the centralized exchanges any time soon until they fix their inherent problems and improve fast enough.

Read the full post here.

Who founded bitcoin is the biggest mystery in technology today, not how it works.

On October 31, 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto posted a whitepaper to a cryptography email list. Still confused by the mastermind who changed monetary history.

Journalists and bloggers have tried in vain to uncover bitcoin's creator. Some candidates self-nominated. We're still looking for the mystery's perpetrator because none of them have provided proof.

One person. I'm confident he invented bitcoin. Let's assess Satoshi Nakamoto before I reveal my pick. Or what he wants us to know.

Satoshi's P2P Foundation biography says he was born in 1975. He doesn't sound or look Japanese. First, he wrote the whitepaper and subsequent articles in flawless English. His sleeping habits are unusual for a Japanese person.

Stefan Thomas, a Bitcoin Forum member, displayed Satoshi's posting timestamps. Satoshi Nakamoto didn't publish between 2 and 8 p.m., Japanese time. Satoshi's identity may not be real.

Why would he disguise himself?

There is a legitimate explanation for this

Phil Zimmermann created PGP to give dissidents an open channel of communication, like Pretty Good Privacy. US government seized this technology after realizing its potential. Police investigate PGP and Zimmermann.

This technology let only two people speak privately. Bitcoin technology makes it possible to send money for free without a bank or other intermediary, removing it from government control.

How much do we know about the person who invented bitcoin?

Here's what we know about Satoshi Nakamoto now that I've covered my doubts about his personality.

Satoshi Nakamoto first appeared with a whitepaper on metzdowd.com. On Halloween 2008, he presented a nine-page paper on a new peer-to-peer electronic monetary system.

Using the nickname satoshi, he created the bitcointalk forum. He kept developing bitcoin and created bitcoin.org. Satoshi mined the genesis block on January 3, 2009.

Satoshi Nakamoto worked with programmers in 2010 to change bitcoin's protocol. He engaged with the bitcoin community. Then he gave Gavin Andresen the keys and codes and transferred community domains. By 2010, he'd abandoned the project.

The bitcoin creator posted his goodbye on April 23, 2011. Mike Hearn asked Satoshi if he planned to rejoin the group.

“I’ve moved on to other things. It’s in good hands with Gavin and everyone.”

Nakamoto Satoshi

The man who broke the banking system vanished. Why?

Satoshi's wallets held 1,000,000 BTC. In December 2017, when the price peaked, he had over US$19 billion. Nakamoto had the 44th-highest net worth then. He's never cashed a bitcoin.

This data suggests something happened to bitcoin's creator. I think Hal Finney is Satoshi Nakamoto .

Hal Finney had ALS and died in 2014. I suppose he created the future of money, then he died, leaving us with only rumors about his identity.

Hal Finney, who was he?

Hal Finney graduated from Caltech in 1979. Student peers voted him the smartest. He took a doctoral-level gravitational field theory course as a freshman. Finney's intelligence meets the first requirement for becoming Satoshi Nakamoto.

Students remember Finney holding an Ayn Rand book. If he'd read this, he may have developed libertarian views.

His beliefs led him to a small group of freethinking programmers. In the 1990s, he joined Cypherpunks. This action promoted the use of strong cryptography and privacy-enhancing technologies for social and political change. Finney helped them achieve a crypto-anarchist perspective as self-proclaimed privacy defenders.

Zimmermann knew Finney well.

Hal replied to a Cypherpunk message about Phil Zimmermann and PGP. He contacted Phil and became PGP Corporation's first member, retiring in 2011. Satoshi Nakamoto quit bitcoin in 2011.

Finney improved the new PGP protocol, but he had to do so secretly. He knew about Phil's PGP issues. I understand why he wanted to hide his identity while creating bitcoin.

Why did he pretend to be from Japan?

His envisioned persona was spot-on. He resided near scientist Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto. Finney could've assumed Nakamoto's identity to hide his. Temple City has 36,000 people, so what are the chances they both lived there? A cryptographic genius with the same name as Bitcoin's creator: coincidence?

Things went differently, I think.

I think Hal Finney sent himself Satoshis messages. I know it's odd. If you want to conceal your involvement, do as follows. He faked messages and transferred the first bitcoins to himself to test the transaction mechanism, so he never returned their money.

Hal Finney created the first reusable proof-of-work system. The bitcoin protocol. In the 1990s, Finney was intrigued by digital money. He invented CRypto cASH in 1993.

Legacy

Hal Finney's contributions should not be forgotten. Even if I'm wrong and he's not Satoshi Nakamoto, we shouldn't forget his bitcoin contribution. He helped us achieve a better future.