According to Cointelegraph, a video from the Crypto '98 conference held on August 26, 1998, in Santa Barbara, features early Bitcoin pioneer Hal Finney discussing the concept of zero-knowledge proofs. This cryptographic technology gained immense popularity decades later and is now widely debated in the crypto industry, particularly for its potential use in scaling the Ethereum network.

In the video, Finney explains how one could hypothetically perform a zero-knowledge proof on a SHA-1 hash, describing the possibility of sending a cryptographically encrypted claim without revealing any of the details contained within the same claim. At the time of Finney's speech, zero-knowledge proofs were considered a possibility but were widely regarded as inefficient or impractical due to hardware limitations.

Hal Finney was a computer scientist who made some of the earliest contributions to privacy-enhancing technology, including the first fully anonymous re-mailer and the first reusable Proof of Work system, which preceded Bitcoin by nearly five years. In 2009, Finney was the first recipient of Bitcoin, transferred 10 BTC by the cryptocurrency's pseudonymous founder Satoshi Nakamoto, and was known to have worked closely with Nakamoto in Bitcoin's earliest days. Some have speculated that Finney could be Satoshi Nakamoto himself, though he has denied the theory. Finney was diagnosed with a rare neurological disease known as ALS, which claimed his life in 2014, and was cryopreserved by the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Arizona.