By
Bhushan Akolkar
April 19th, 2024
Following multiple complaints from the ‘army’ of Bitcoin supporters for taking a pro-BCH stand, @bitcoin was suspended for alleged impersonation.
Social networking website Twitter yet again cracks a whip on the misleading Twitter account ‘@Bitcoin’, this time by completely suspending it. Advocates of Bitcoin have been continuously reporting about the rogue behavior of @bitcoin while taking a pro-Bitcoin stand and trying to defame the original cryptocurrency.
As a result of this, the Bitcoin core supporters have been repeatedly asking for the shutdown of the account and the r/Bitcoin brigade on Reddit has been repeatedly asking for the censorship of this BCH mouthpiece. After the separation of Bitcoin Cash from the Bitcoin network last year in August 2017 during the first hard fork on the Bitcoin network, supporters of both have been often spotted in a verbal war with each other with both of them wanting to gain the lead in the scalability race.
Following the suspension, Litecoin creator Charlie Lee was quick to express his enthusiasm on Twitter:
Oh snap! @bitcoin 😂 pic.twitter.com/yGcIcioxC6
— Charlie Lee Ⓜ️🕸️ (@SatoshiLite) April 8, 2018
One of the major reasons behind the suspension of @bitcoin could be spamming and impersonation. At the heart of this controversy is believed to be ‘Bitcoin Jesus’ Roger Ver who is known for his pro-BCH stand in this highly divided competition. The account was suspended on April 8, Sunday. It is said that Twitter took the action after a number of complaints from Twitter users, and an army of Bitcoin supporters is alleged to be behind this.
Following the suspension, Roger Ver was quick enough to Tweet about this matter on his Twitter handle calling it the detah of “free speech”.
So this is how free speech dies…with thunderous applause.@bitcoinhttps://t.co/TMZc0EWoIx
— Roger Ver (@rogerkver) April 8, 2018
Once the most influential proponents of Bitcoin, Ver was recently seen favoring BCH over BTC due to the latter’s latest scalability issues of high costs and slow transactions. As a result, Ver has been vocal of BCH gaining superiority over BTC.
Ver tweet sparked-off the discussion further with both the camps taking their sides and trying to prove the other one wrong. ‘Cypherpunk’ Jameson Lopp replied to Ver’s tweet, saying that “freedom of speech means that the government won’t throw you in a cage for saying something it doesn’t condone. Freedom of speech doesn’t mean that you can do whatever you want on someone else’s property.”
On the other hand, a BCH supporter and Reddit user BeijingBitcoins wrote: “Welcome to the new Silicon Valley. All these guys who thought they were being disruptive to the old ways of doing things have instead amplified the censorship, information control, and social manipulation to levels that would have Orwell turning in his grave.”
Bitcoin’s scalability issue has been a long-standing debate going on ever since the first hardfork in the Bitcoin network. One of the major reasons of the fall of Bitcoin since the mid-December 2017 is that due to huge investor rush and participation, the Bitcoin network got completely clogged shooting up the transaction costs and slowing up the transactions speeds. As a result, many retail investors started pulling out their investments from Bitcoins and putting them in other alternatives like Ethereum and Ripple which were seen gaining momentum at the same time.
However, a good amount of progress has been done over the most proposed ‘Lightning Network‘ solution.