A number of cryptocurrency supporters have been getting riled up lately over the @Bitcoin account on Twitter. Over the last 48 hours, various bitcoin core (BTC) supporters have been reporting the account to Twitter and the platform’s CEO Jack Dorsey. Things escalated when one BTC supporter private messaged Dorsey about getting the @Bitcoin account banned, to which the social media executive replied: “What do you recommend we do with it?”
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Private Messages Shared on Twitter Spark More Debate About the @Bitcoin Twitter Handle
Crypto Twitter has a lot of vitriolic energy and lately some of it has been directed at the @Bitcoin Twitter account. The account in question has over 930,000 followers and is controversial to some individuals because it regularly tweets about bitcoin cash (BCH). The @Bitcoin account described long ago how it changed it’s opinion since BTC wasn’t scaling and the Core developers behind it decided not to fix the issues at hand.
By 2017, this became really apparent to the @Bitcoin account when network fees exceeded $50 per transaction and some Core enthusiasts decided to celebrate the problem. Since the BTC narrative change from peer-to-peer cash to a store of value, the @Bitcoin account decided to support the BCH roadmap. The account has been tweeting about BCH and criticizing the BTC network’s problems for quite some time now. This has caused some maximalists on Twitter to get infuriated with the account’s tweets and a few have been reporting the account to Twitter admins.
Some of these people also called upon Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter who is also a known investor in the Lightning Network. A few of the people simply tagged @Jack and asked him to ban the account. However, one BTC proponent and analyst for Messari, Zack Voell, sent Dorsey a private message. Voell was allegedly sent a response from Dorsey as well, according to the screenshot Voell shared. “What do you recommend we do with it?” asked the Twitter CEO in the private message. After a few individuals told Voell that it was unethical to share a private message to the public, the tweet was then deleted. The owner of Bitcoin.org, Cobra Bitcoin, told Voell: “It’s bad etiquette to share private messages.”
The @Bitcoin account has already been banned in 2018 and then subsequently shadow banned following the initial removal. The @Bitcoin profile, with close to 1 million followers, now has far less of an audience reach than before. On April 20, the account spoke out once again about the individuals attempting to silence it.
“The BTC maxis especially don’t like when I point out the obvious contradiction in promoting censorship-resistance as a fundamental value,” the @Bitcoin account tweeted. “While they also going around abusing Twitter’s report function to deplatform voices they don’t like. Twitter CEO @jack is aware and is complicit.”
A Private Account Is Free to Support Whatever Chain it Believes Is Bitcoin
After all the tweets about reporting the account to Twitter admins and the private message to Dorsey, many BCH fans changed their Twitter profile pictures and replaced them with the @Bitcoin avatar. They also started a hashtag #WeAreAllBitcoin as an act of protest, similar to last week’s Twitter display where many Twitter users changed their profile pictures claiming to be the Twitter user @Hodlonaut. The basic argument concerning the @Bitcoin account is that maximalists believe there can only be one version of Bitcoin and everything else is fraudulent.
On the other side of the debate, BCH supporters and those of other forks of the protocol believe there are multiple versions of Bitcoin now. This is similar to the debate that was spurred when Ethereum split into two chains and there are many today who believe Ethereum Classic is a legitimate version of the protocol. Some even consider ETC the “original chain” whose immutability remains intact.
There are also those who believe that only a couple of versions of the Bitcoin protocol have what it takes to compete in the free market. Supporters of the @Bitcoin account say the owner should be able to support any version of the protocol they desire.
The @Bitcoin Twitter profile is a private account and no person or group besides the owner should obstruct the account’s opinions. In many people’s eyes, Bitcoin itself is open source technology, free from copyright, trademarks and owners, so banning the @Bitcoin account would be an act of censorship. Furthermore, with Dorsey being an investor in Lightning, some have said that it may not be in his best interests to ban an account based on the subjective opinions of others.
The debate on Twitter rages on this weekend and it has been quite the spectacle to say the least. It’s likely the arguments will continue in this vein long into next week across crypto Twitter. As the adage goes, there’s never a dull day in Bitcoin.
What do you think about the controversy surrounding the @Bitcoin account? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.
Image credits: Shutterstock, Pixabay, and Twitter.
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