As Trijo News reported Sunday, the Twitter account @Bitcoin suddenly got shut down without notice. Those who tried visiting the accounts profile page got a message saying that the account has been suspended due to violations of Twitters rules.
For some time, the @Bitcoin account has been used to promote Bitcoin Cash, a fork from the Bitcoin blockchain that occurred last year after a disagreement on how the network should scale. The fact that the account marketed Bitcoin Cash led to a large number of users reporting it to be inaccurate, that is being an official channel for news about Bitcoin.
Whether it was the reason why the account was suspended is still unclear.
“We don’t comment on individual accounts for privacy and security reasons”, a spokesman for Twitter wrote to Trijo News.
According to Bloomberg, after a while, the account opened again, this time under what appeared to be new control. In the bio one could read “My name is Andrei from Moscow Russia”. The account was also set to private, which meant that only users who were approved by the account could follow it. It had lost many of its previous over 700,000 followers.
During Monday, however, the next twist unfolded in this story: The @Bitcoin Twitter account was back.
From what seems to be the original owner of the account came a tweet demanding an explanation from Twitter. The person accuses Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and investor in Lightning Network (a Bitcoin Core scaling solution that competes with Bitcoin Cash for low-cost transactions), for having disabled the account, giving it to someone else, and then returning it with 750,000 fewer followers.
Whether the allegations against Jack Dorsey are correct are currently extremely unclear.
Roger Ver, a well-known advocate for Bitcoin Cash, writes on Twitter that he never owned the @Bitcoin account, but that it’s owned by someone that has been involved in Bitcoin since 2009. This person should also be a supporter of Bitcoin Cash today.
Twitter may have reactivated the account as its followers appear to be coming back. However, if all over 700,000 will return remains to be seen.
The oftentimes virulent debate, which began with the Bitcoin fork in August last year, shows the downside of decentralized organizations where many people must agree.
“The cryptocurrency development is open source, which means disagreements get aired publicly with the additional angle of the forking of a blockchain, where you have to take the entire network with you, and that creates much more tension. I don’t expect that to change anytime soon”, said Neeraj Agrawal, a spokesman at blockchain research advocacy Coin Center, to Bloomberg.
