Hal Finney’s Twitter account just came back to life

The Twitter account of one of Bitcoin’s biggest historical figures just came back to life after over a decade of inactivity.

“This is Fran Finney,” tweeted Hal Finney’s Twitter handle, “halfin,” on Friday. “I’m tweeting for Hal to avoid his account being purged by Elon.”

Hal Finney is one of the earliest Bitcoin testers who confirms with the network’s anonymous founder, Satoshi Nakamoto, in its early days. January 12, 2009, he received 10 Bitcoin from Satoshi – the first Bitcoin transfer ever made. In fact, many today in the Bitcoin community believe that Finney is likely our Satoshi – or at least part of a group of developers behind the pseudonym.

Finney died of a terminal illness in August 2014, leaving both him and Satoshi absent from Bitcoin’s future development. As such, Bitcoin faithful treat Finney’s old messages, tweets and forum posts as precious artifacts – as they do messages signed by Satoshi.

A particularly popular message was his announcement tweet that he “ran Bitcoin” on January 10, 2009. By own accounthe may have been the second person to run the software after Satoshi himself.

Naturally, the sudden revival of Finney surprised some. Jameson Lopp – co-founder and CEO of Bitcoin security and wallet company Casa – basically proposed the account may have been compromised after realizing it had recently followed his own Twitter account.

However, others were quick to point out that Finney’s account may have been reactivated by someone who controls it to avoid it being “cleaned by Elon.” Hal’s wife, Fran Finney, confirmed even that this was indeed the case.

Since taking over Twitter, Elon Musk hair promised to delete over 1.5 billion Twitter accounts to free up certain Twitter handles for newer, more active owners. “These are obvious account deletions with no tweets and no login for years,” he said on December 9.

His announcement sparked concern among Bitcoiners, who worried that such a policy could allow accounts like Finney’s to fall through the cracks. After Fran reactivated the handle, the community was quick to thank.

Finney was a cypherpunk – meaning he believed in using cryptography to guarantee freedom and privacy for all. He also lived in the same town as Dorian Nakamoto, the husband Newsweek very famous and very wrongly said was Satoshi, for about 10 years.

For what it’s worth, Finney denied claims he was the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin before he passed away — exactly the kind of thing Satoshi would do.