Fran Finney, the widow of the legendary Hal Finney, organizes a charity marathon for her late husband via Twitter. The event will be called Running Bitcoin and the goal is to raise money for ALS research. This is the disease that Hal Finney contracted in 2009 and died from in 2014.
Hal Finney and Bitcoin
If you’ve been in the industry for a while, you probably know that Finney is a legend in the bitcoin world. For example, on January 11, 2009, Finney was the first to tweet about Bitcoin. It is the message below that is still occasionally remembered by a large group of bitcoiners.
execute bitcoin
— halfin (@halfin) January 11, 2009
In addition to the first Bitcoin tweet, Finney was also the first recipient of a transaction. Satoshi Nakamoto sent Finney 10 Bitcoin as a test on January 12, 2009. See the image below for more details of the transaction.

“The moment Satoshi released the first version of the software, I jumped right in,” Finney said in a 2013 post on Bitcointalk. “I think I was the first person to manage Bitcoin after Satoshi. […] In the days that followed, I had an email conversation with Satoshi, mostly forwarding and fixing bugs,” says Finney.
Is Hal Finney Satoshi Nakamoto?
There are also those who think that Hal Finney is the man behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. Before Bitcoin was discovered by Nakamoto, Finney had been working with digital money for years. For example, he designed Reusable Proof of Work (RPOW), another digital currency that runs on a central server. RPOW wasn’t perfect, but in some ways it was a precursor to Bitcoin.
Hal Finney wrote the world’s first implemented cryptocurrency, RPOW (reusable proof of work), which was used @adam3usPoW algorithm by . https://t.co/d9oROSwOo3
—Nick Szabo (@NickSzabo4) March 27, 2017
Even if we concluded that Hal Finney is not Satoshi Nakamoto, his contribution to Bitcoin would be undeniable. Together with Nick Szabo and Adam Back, among others, he was one of the big names in the world before the rise of Bitcoin in January 2009.

“If you don’t believe or understand me, I don’t have time to convince you, sorry,” Satoshi Nakamoto wrote in July 2010. This post comes several months after Finney was told in August 2009 that he suffered from ALS- muscle. Posts like this make people believe that there is at least a chance that Finney is behind the alias Satoshi Nakamoto.
Run Bitcoin
Before Finney was diagnosed with ALS, he was also an avid runner. The photo below regularly appears in the Bitcoin community on Twitter. It must not have been a coincidence that on January 11, 2009, Hal Finney chose the words “Running Bitcoin” as his runner. So now his wife is organizing a race to raise money for research into this terrible disease.

The event will take place from January 1 to 10, 2023. Anyone who donates $100 or 700,000 satoshi will receive the official 2023 Running Bitcoin Challenge shirt. To date, $9,914.07 has already been raised against the $50,000 goal. Fran Finney, Hal’s wife, personally donated $4,023 to the event.
Source: Btc Direct
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Roy Brown is a renowned economist and author at The Nation View. He has a deep understanding of the global economy and its intricacies. He writes about a wide range of economic topics, including monetary policy, fiscal policy, international trade, and labor markets.