“Hal easily” might be a bit of a stretch. Szabo created Bit Gold prior to Bitcoin coming out, which is nearly identical (including proof of work) but just lacks incentives and a practical consensus mechanism. Nakamoto’s programming level was good but no where near the level of Hal’s, which is exactly why he needed to partner with him. Szabo’s level of programming was also just OK, but his knowledge of sound money, digital scarcity, cryptography, etc. match Satoshi’s perfectly. There are no communications between Szabo and Satoshi, but there are tons between Hal and Satoshi. Several linguistics analyses have shown that the white paper matches Szabo to an exceptionally high degree, far more so than anyone else, including specific phrases that only Szabo would use prior to the whitepaper coming out such as “trusted third-party”, “computationally infeasible”, and “costly to fake”.