No idea about the novel - other than it being Libertarian. But hearing from Hal's early contemporaries that he was deeply into the novel seems something that we can't overlook.
With Hal being heavily into cryptography, being Satoshi's 'first contact' and heavily into Libertarianism - it's difficult not to believe that Hal wasn't Satoshi.
They do remember Finney as an unusually intelligent and thoughtful student, who at times carried around an impressively large copy of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and seemed to have adopted its lessons about libertarian free thinking. Friends recall him quietly sitting in the back of a physics class, only to approach the teacher afterwards to correct an error or suggest a better way of articulating a problem. At math team competitions, Finney would ring in with an answer to most questions before they’d been fully asked. In 1974, his senior year, he was voted “most brains” by his peers.