They Hacked Twitter, Not Bitcoin.

Yesterday was one of the craziest days in the roughly two decade history of social media.

Here’s what happened.

In the late afternoon/early evening of July 15th, 2020, a number of prominent crypto Twitter accounts all tweeted the same message at roughly the same time.

Before long, it wasn’t constrained to crypto. Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Kanye West, Barack Obama, Jeff Bezos — everyone, it seemed, was doing crypto giveaways.

It got so bad that Twitter had to shut down all verified accounts (those with blue check marks) for a number of hours to get things under control.

Almost immediately, the narrative machine kicked in.

Prominent accounts tweeted things like this:

Imagine, if you will, a world in which every time there was a bank robbery, every prominent newspaper called it a “dollar scam.” If an individual committed an all-too-common scam of pretending to be the IRS — is that a “dollar scam” as well?

This is exactly what’s happening here.

The language used implies that every time a scam or hack occurs involving bitcoin as the currency, it is somehow the fault of bitcoin itself.

The quickness to call this a “bitcoin scam” rather than what it was — a Twitter hack — shows how far we still have to go in terms of public perception of this asset class.

Let’s actually review the tape on “bitcoin hacks” shall we?

Oh, that’s right, it hasn’t happened.

In fact, in the 10+ years of bitcoin’s existence, it has had 99.98% up time.

And unlike the pittance (less than $150k in BTC) that these hackers made off with, the honey pot for a true bitcoin attack is roughly $168 BILLION.

This was, plain and simple, a centralized platform that was hacked. It was a radical demonstration of the problems of centralization and single points of failures.

It was, in other words, an attack that exposed a vulnerability at the very center of the reason d’etre for bitcoin.

If you’re frustrated by the narrative turn, you’re not alone. But instead of looking at the glass only as half empty, take this moment to educate the folks around you.

And remember, always remember we’re making progress. For as many people as there were using this as a chance to unfairly critique the crypto space, there were also others from a huge variety of backgrounds and industries who were stepping up to defend bitcoin as well.

The truth is that, even though this sort of event might drag the narrative backwards, the longer the crypto industry continues to grow and thrive, the more we leave behind the idea that it is just for nefarious activities. We’ll leave you with this tweet from a sitting member of Congress. Keep building.

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