Tag: bitcoin

Over the weekend, Twitter suspended the @Bitcoin Twitter account that is run by an anonymous user. The account was then briefly handed over to a user who claimed to be Turkish before it was taken over by another user who claimed to be Russian. However, the account was restored to its previous owner on Monday afternoon, but this has sparked a whole lot of conspiracy theories.

A Twitter spokesperson said that there was nothing to share as the company does not “comment on individual accounts.” Not many people are buying this excuse though:

“That’s some bullshit if you ask me,” the user behind @Bitcoin tweeted. “I’d like to know why my account was given to someone else, and then when it’s reinstated I’m missing 750,000 of my followers.”

Before its suspension, the @Bitcoin Twitter account had over 821,000 followers. Twitter is already making efforts towards restoring all the followers that disappeared even though this will not take it out of the bitcoin community’s spotlight especially considering the vast number of conspiracy theories that the suspension has spawned.

The @Bitcoin account has always been supportive of Bitcoin Cash, the bitcoin fork that was founded by a group of miners, developers and members of the bitcoin community who split off in August 2017 citing a disagreement over how the network’s growing scaling issues would be addressed. The result of this move was a duplicate of the bitcoin blockchain as well as totally new digital currency.

Twitter Has Always Been the Battleground

The relationship between Bitcoin Cash and bitcoin, which is sometimes referred to as a Bitcoin Core, has always been rather rancorous, to say the least. Both cryptocurrencies’ most fervent supporters have always gone head to head against each other with Twitter being one of their favourite battlefields. The @Bitcoin Twitter account is just the latest victim.

Many Bitcoin Cash supporters suspect that the Bitcoin Core supporters had something to do with the suspension of the @Bitcoin Twitter account – they suspect the Bitcoin Core supported falsely reported the account to Twitter for harassment or spam. In general, there has been a lot of back-and-forth online battles pertaining to the two digital currencies which implies that there is more to come.

A deeper conspiracy theory suggests that the @Bitcoin account was suspended because the social media site’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, is a Bitcoin Core supporter. Dorsey happens to have invested $2.5 million in startup known as Lighting Labs that builds technology for Bitcoin Core.

These are all just speculative rumours and theories but regardless of the fact that Twitter recently banned cryptocurrency-related ads, the company has confirmed that it does not have any content rules that are specific to cryptocurrencies.

According to a court document that was published a couple of days ago (on March 20), a Dutch court classifies bitcoin as a legitimate “transferable value”, a ruling that was made in favour of a plaintiff who was owed 0.591 BTC by a private company.

The petitioner, Mr J.W. de Vries filed the claim on February 2 this year against Koinz Trading BV which is a non-public company that had been previously ordered by a lower court of Midden-Nederland to 0.591 BTC worth of mining proceeds owed to Mr Vries, or risk a €10,000 worth of penalty payment. Since the company had already defied the initial ruling from the lower court that required it to pay the required amount in BTC, the Dutch court ordered the company to either follow the directive or be declared insolvent.

The court judgement went further to state that bitcoin exhibits all the characteristics of a property right. As such, any claim to transfer bitcoin under property rights is considered to be valid under existing laws.

“Bitcoin exists, according to the court, from a unique, digitally encrypted series of numbers and letters stored on the hard drive of the right-holder’s computer. Bitcoin is ‘delivered’ by sending bitcoins from one wallet to another wallet. Bitcoins are stand-alone value files, which are delivered directly to the payee by the payer in the event of a payment. It follows that a Bitcoin represents a value and is transferable. In the court’s view, it thus shows characteristics of a property right. A claim for payment in Bitcoin is, therefore, to be regarded as a claim that qualifies for verification,” the court judgement read.

The findings of the court included an undisputed contract between Koinz Trading BV and Mr Vries and since the initial undertaking was in bitcoin, the amount was also to be paid back in the same way. This legal relationship was qualified as a civil obligation to pay.

This particular event is one of the many milestones, most of which are yet to come, of the crypto-ecosystem that will see bitcoin through to mainstream acceptance as a standard mode of payment alongside the government-issued fiat currencies. It certainly won’t be too long until this happens but in the meantime, a number of issues, such as the recent unintended content found on the bitcoin blockchain that must be sorted out.