Hal Finney’s wife resumes activity on bitcoin pioneer’s Twitter account to avoid potential purge

Fran Finney, the wife of computer scientist Hal Finney — the recipient of the first transaction on Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin blockchain — reactivated her late husband’s Twitter account over concerns that Twitter CEO Elon Musk might compromise the social media platform’s content delete from inactivity.

Many crypto Twitter users reported on Dec. 16 that Finney’s account saw activity for the first time in more than 12 years. Some speculated that a hacker might have taken control of the Bitcoin (BTC) pioneer’s account and its more than 71,000 followers, but Fran quickly stepped in to dispel rumours.

“I tweet for Hal […] to avoid having his account deleted by Elon,” Fran said.

I want to keep Hal’s account active and will occasionally post from his account. If I post, I will continue to mark myself as a poster.

— Fran Finney (@franfinney) December 16, 2022

It’s unclear if Fran Finney’s intervention can save the crypto pioneer’s social media presence. Amid Musk’s $44 billion purchase of Twitter, which closed in October, he claimed he supports freedom of expression as “the bedrock of a functioning democracy.”

However, under Musk’s leadership, on December 15 the social media platform deleted a number of accounts controlled by high-profile journalists at institutions including CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post. Accounts tracking the movements of Musk’s private flights and promoting social networking platform Mastodon – which attracted many Twitter users following the billionaire’s takeover – have also been suspended. The Twitter CEO claimed the former “doxxed my exact location in real-time.”

Why have journalists been banned from their Twitter accounts? Please explain. And it had better be a GOOD explanation.

— Stephen King (@StephenKing) December 16, 2022

Musk had a net worth of more than $300 billion as of October 2021 before acquiring Twitter, and around the same time, Tesla stock price hit an all-time high of $407.36 in November 2021. In about a year, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index showed that the Tesla CEO had become the second richest person in the world at the time of publication, with a reported net worth of $169 billion.

As CEO, Musk oversaw a series of controversial decisions at Twitter that caused many in the business community to question his acumen. He fired many top executives, including many members of the platform’s content moderation team, and attempted to charge users for “verified” blue ticks – resulting in many fake accounts with some semblance of legitimacy. The social media platform also saw a surge in tweets containing hate speech and misinformation about vaccines, putting advertisers’ revenues at risk.

Twitter users appeared to be largely supportive of Fran Finney’s efforts to show that the account was still active and beneficial to the crypto community. Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey also took to the platform to express his surprise at the account’s reactivation.

“There should be a way to protect accounts of historical importance,” Twitter user 0xAphelion said of Hal Finney’s account. “But better be safe than sorry.”

Related: Crypto spam bots fall silent as Musk vows to prosecute scammers

Hal Finney was one of the most recognizable names in the crypto space as he was one of the first to respond to Satoshi’s post on the Cypherpunks mailing list. He died in 2014 at the age of 58 from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis – ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

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