Twitter Briefly Suspends @Bitcoin Sparking Wild Theories

On Sunday, Twitter briefly suspended @Bitcoin which is one of the oldest and most popular crypto-affiliated Twitter accounts. This move by Twitter has raised a raft of questions as well as suspicion among cryptocurrency users who are on either side of the Bitcoin Cash-Bitcoin Core divide. The Twitter account was handed over briefly to a user who claimed to be Turkish and then to another user who claimed to Russian before finally being returned to its owner on Monday afternoon.

At the time of its restoration, the account was short of 750,000 followers but Twitter has been working towards reinstating all of the account’s followers. Meanwhile, a number of accusations begun flying around which only served to fuel the already blazing controversy that involves bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash and the Lightning Network.

While Twitter did not give any public explanation for the suspension, some theorists have suggested that the move was in response to complaints mounted on the social media platform by Bitcoin Core (bitcoin) supporters who weren’t happy about the account’s support for Bitcoin Cash. Bitcoin Cash is an altcoin that split off from bitcoin in August last year after the members of the community disagreed over how they were going to address network scaling issues. Since then, the relationship between Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Cash has always been acrimonious, to say the least.

The @Bitcoin Twitter account has been in the spotlight before with users calling for its suspensions. In January, for instance, a Twitter user called it a “Fake @Bitcoin account” and asked users to report it.

“I complained to Google because when I would Google bitcoin I would get a prominently displayed Twitter feed of @Bitcoin with three separate posts, and always the first one was that Bitcoin Cash was the real bitcoin,” read a Reddit comment. “I found it a fraudulent statement intended to confuse and induce newbies to buy their cheap knock-off product.”

As always, there was a lot of disagreement pertaining to the suspension of the account but the threads were eventually shut down as moderators claimed that the users were “brigading and vote cheating.”

One of the more bold theories pointed to Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey, who is allegedly biased due to his support for Bitcoin Core and his $2.5 million investment in a startup called Lightning Labs that builds technology for Bitcoin Core.