One of the first bitcoin holders who died 8 years ago has returned to Twitter

Due to the risk of deleting inactive Twitter accounts, the wife of the first recipient of a bitcoin transaction by programmer Hal Finney, who died 8 years ago, reactivated his account. Fran Finney explained that she did not want her late husband’s account to be blocked or deleted.

After Hal Finney’s page was active for the first time in many years, some members of the cryptocurrency community began to assume that a hacker had gained access to the account. However, after a while, the programmer’s wife wrote on her page: «I'll be posting tweets from Hal’s account to avoid his account being deleted by Elon Musk.»

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.

— Fran Finney (@franfinney) December 16, 2022

It is not yet known whether Fran Finney’s activism will help save her husband’s account, as it is impossible to predict what will happen on Twitter. On December 15, under Musk’s leadership, social media moderators deleted a number of accounts of CNN, New York Times, and Washington Post journalists. The account of the @ElonJet bot was also blocked — the algorithm tracked the flights of Elon Musk’s private jet in real time. The billionaire himself filed a lawsuit against the bot’s developer, a 20-year-old student at the University of Central Florida, Jack Sweeney, whose profile was also banned. More recently, Twitter started censoring Vitalik Buterin's account.

Regarding Hal Finney’s account, one of the users noted: «There must be a way to protect accounts of historical significance.» The programmer is an important figure in the history of the flagship cryptocurrency, and for a long time he was considered the father of bitcoin.

This week, Finney’s name appeared in the «Villain of the Year» investigation by By Martin Shkreli, who outlined his guesses as to who the developer of the VTS might be. In the Substack mailing list with the headline: «Paul Le Roux to Satoshi,» Shkreli shared a screenshot with the bitcoin address «1Q2TWHE3GMdB6BZKafqwxXtWAWgFt5Jvm3» — the address where Satoshi Nakamoto sent 10 BTC on January 12, 2009 to Hal Finney. The transaction contained the following signature: «This transfer was made by Paul Le Roux for Hal Finney on January 12, 2009». Accordingly, Le Roux can be considered Satoshi Nakamoto.