Early Bitcoin Contributor Hal Finney’s Twitter Account Is Back After 12 Years of Silence

Image: CryptoSlate

A Twitter account owned by Hal Finney, one of the early Bitcoin contributors and adopters, has been reactivated after twelve years of inactivity. The step was taken in order to prevent the removal of the account from the platform due to its inactivity and the part of Bitcoin history linked with it.

In early December, in a series of tweets, Elon Musk announced that Twitter would delete and free names of 1.5 billion accounts that have been inactive for years on the platform. “Twitter will soon start freeing the name space of 1.5 billion accounts,” he wrote. “These are obvious account deletions with no tweets & no log in for years,” Musk added. It became a popular request after he bought Twitter. The problem is that during the existence of Twitter, a lot of interesting, fun, and cool names (Twitter handles) have been chosen by different users. Over time, some accounts became inactive for various reasons, but these cool handles remained tied to those accounts and could no longer be used by others.

In light of this announcement, the account of Hal Finney, the first person to receive a blockchain transaction from Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009, became active again. Finney actively used his Twitter account until 2010. After that, he stopped using it but contributed to Bitcoin until he died from ALS complications in 2014.

Due to fears that the impending release of 1.5 billion active accounts would affect Finney's account and inadvertently delete part of Bitcoin's history, his Twitter account became active again on December 16. The return of the account was initially met with some skepticism, as Bitcoin proponents feared that an attacker could gain control of Finney's account. However, his widow, Fran Finney, soon confirmed that she had tweeted on behalf of her husband. A little later, she also added:

"I want to keep Hal's account active, and occasionally will be posting from his account. When I do post, I will continue to tag myself as the poster."

© 2022, Eva Fox | Tesmanian. All rights reserved.

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