In early 2009, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, formulated the genesis block. On January 3 that year, the first batch of 50 BTC was mined into existence.
Computer Scientist Hal Finney was one of the earliest Bitcoin testers to who joined hands with Satoshi Nakamoto. On this day 14 years ago, Finney tweeted about Bitcoin becoming the first ever person to do so.
Also Read: Satoshi Nakamoto Mined the 1st Bitcoin Block 14 Years Ago
On January 12, 2009, the maiden Bitcoin transaction took place. Finney received 10 BTC from Satoshi Nakamoto. The said transfer affirmed that Bitcoin did work as a money network in reality.
In a Bitcointalk forum post written at that time, the computer scientist revealed,
“I think I was the first person besides Satoshi to run bitcoin. I mined block 70-something, and I was the recipient of the first bitcoin transaction, when Satoshi sent ten coins to me as a test.”
Finney added that he carried on an email conversation with Nakamoto over the next few days. He mostly reported about bugs and Nakamoto resorted to fixing them.
The Computer Scientist was also one of the first people who predicted the future price of Bitcoin. Considering the total worldwide household wealth to be around $100-300 trillion, he projected the value of each coin to eventually hit about $10 million.
In a mail that sent to Nakamoto in 2009, he asserted that the possibility of generating coins at that time, with a few cents of compute time, could be “quite a good bet.”
Finney’s Twitter Account Comes Back To Life
Finney’s Twitter account account became active, out of the blue, in December 2022. For context, he had not tweeted since 2010 and passed away from a fatal disease in 2014.
The tweet sent from Hal Finney’s Twitter handle read,
“This is Fran Finney. I am tweeting for Hal to avoid his account being purged by Elon.”
Around that time, notably, Elon Musk revealed that Twitter would delete over 1.5 billion accounts in order to free up certain handles for newer and more active owners. “These are obvious account deletions with no tweets & no log-in for years,” he said.
Community members, however, opined that accounts owned by people who have passed away have “historical value,” and ought to be preserved. A few also outrightly said that Hal Finney’s handle had to be protected.
People from the space later thanked Fran Finney for keeping the account up and running and were “glad” to know that it would be preserved.