On December 9, 2022, Twitter’s owner Elon Musk told the public that the social media company plans to purge 1.5 billion accounts. Musk further added that the deletions would be obvious accounts that have no tweets or they haven’t logged in for years. However, after Musk announced this plan, a large number of cryptocurrency advocates have become concerned that Hal Finney’s account would be among the purged names. Finney, who passed away in August 2014, was the first to mention bitcoin in a tweet on the public forum.
Bitcoiners ask Twitter’s Elon Musk to preserve computer scientist Hal Finney’s Twitter account
Cryptocurrency supporters have been concerned that computer scientist Hal Finney’s Twitter account will be deleted. The reason people have been concerned about the deletion of Finney’s account is because Elon Musk said that Twitter plans to delete 1.5 billion inactive accounts. “Twitter will soon begin freeing up the namespace of 1.5 billion accounts,” Musk wrote Dec 9, 2022. “These are obvious account deletions without tweets [and] no login for years,” Musk added.
An account that hasn’t tweeted in years and likely hasn’t logged into for years, unless a family member or friend still has access, is early bitcoiner Hal Finney’s Twitter account – @halfin. Finney was a computer scientist known for being one of the first to run the Bitcoin software (besides Satoshi), and the recipient of the first BTC transaction sent on the network and confirmed at block height 170. Following Musk’s statements about deleting accounts, a A number of Twitter users hit Musk in tweets asking him to preserve Finney’s Twitter account. One individual wrote:
Hal Finney’s Twitter account must be preserved @elonmusk. PLEASE DO NOT CLEAN!
Another Twitter user wrote to Musk in response to his recent cleansing remarks, asking him not to delete Finney’s social media account. “Please not at all [the] account of Hal Finney. One of [the] important Twitter accounts in Bitcoin [and] crypto space”, the user begged with Twitter’s owner. Finney was the first Twitter account to mention the topic of Bitcoin on the social media platform on January 10, 2009, at 10:33 PM (ET). “Running bitcoin,” Finney tweeted that day and the tweet has more than 55,000 likes at the time of writing. The @halfin account has more than 69,400 Twitter followers on December 12, 2022.
Not only did Finney tweet about “running bitcoin” on January 10, but it’s also very likely that he mined his first BTC block the very next day. Block 78 is associated with Finney’s set of transactions and bitcoins he mined that year, and it is highly likely that he mined block 78 on January 11, 2009. Block 78 is not only associated with Finney’s set of 2009 transactions and all the coinbase rewards he collected, but it is also linked to the first BTC transaction of 10 BTC on January 12, 2009 3:30 AM (ET)bitcoins originally derived from Bitcoin block 9.
Also, Finney’s “running bitcoin” tweet isn’t the only post he made about the decentralized cryptocurrency network. “Looking at ways to add more anonymity to bitcoin,” Finney so 21 January 2009. “Considering How to Reduce CO2 Emissions from Widespread Bitcoin Implementation,” Finney wrote on January 27, 2009. In Finney’s “running bitcoin” tweet, bitcoin supporter Lyn Alden tweeted that she hopes the computer scientist’s account will not be among the purged accounts targeted for deletion.
“Hopefully this account isn’t one of the dormant accounts being purged from Twitter,” Alden so. “It would be good to have a project to keep a few hundred accounts around if they have a significant level of historical relevance.”
Some users too is recommended periodically like the classic tweet to keep it relevant. “@elonmusk should pay attention to follower count here. If otherwise ‘inactive’ accounts are picking up new followers, they’re probably historically significant,” another person wrote.
What do you think about Elon Musk considering purging 1.5 billion inactive Twitter accounts? What do you think about crypto supporters asking Musk not to delete Hal Finney’s Twitter account and keep it? Let us know what you think about this topic in the comments section below.
Jamie Redman
Jamie Redman is the news editor at Bitcoin.com News and a financial technology journalist living in Florida. Redman has been an active member of the cryptocurrency community since 2011. He has a passion for Bitcoin, open source and decentralized applications. Since September 2015, Redman has written more than 6,000 articles for Bitcoin.com News about the disruptive protocols emerging today.
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