The massive Twitter hack that happened just a few hours ago could either be good or bad for Bitcoin and for cryptocurrency as a whole. Depending on who you ask, those who don’t want to understand it will most likely be in support of Bitcoin being banned.
Ban Bitcoin?
The “Ban Bitcoin” movement appears to achieve momentum because according to people who support this idea, if there is no Bitcoin, there wouldn’t be an incentive to do scams. Criminals turned to Bitcoin to supposedly hide their trail. (Without knowing Bitcoin actually makes them more traceable.)
Others believe the hacking (and the eventual giveaway scam) was planned earlier to outlaw Bitcoin. One Twitter user lamented, “Ask yourself how they hacked people just like that. And don’t forget that Trump wasn’t hacked.”
The Case for Decentralization
But those who understand Bitcoin know the Twitter hack is an obvious demonstration that it’s time to decentralize.
Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota seems to think so – that Bitcoin is not the problem here but centralized control. Twitter, Google, and many companies’ servers and resources are centralized. This means there is a single source of a possible breakdown. Just like what happened with Twitter yesterday, it took one careless person, who Twitter is currently investigating, to hack the entire network. According to numerous reports, the hackers employed a Twitter insider who “basically did all the work” for them.
This is not possible with a public blockchain. If data from one node is changed, the entire network must also modify its data. One node could not tamper the entire network because it takes a lot of computing power to be able to pull it off. And the reason why such an attack (51 percent attack) has not taken place is that there is tremendous incentive to not do so.
Twitter Scam
They hacked twitter, not bitcoin. Pass it on.
— Blockfolio (@blockfolio) July 15, 2020
It is important to note that in the grand scheme of things, what happened is a Twitter scam or a Twitter hack. Someone had access to Twitter’s servers, took control of major accounts, and made a concerted effort to entice users in a Bitcoin giveaway scam. Bitcoin itself was not hacked.
This is a Twitter scam, not a cryptocurrency scam. In the same way that when a Nigerian prince asked me to wire him $100,000, it was an email scam, not a US dollar scam. https://t.co/wR3YP6RUbA
— Jeff Dorman, CFA (@jdorman81) July 15, 2020
Still, despite the fact that Bitcoin was only an accessory to the hacking occurrence, the narrative run by the mainstream media stressed that what happened was a “Bitcoin scam”.
Main stream media coverage of this hack & privacy breach: “bitcoin scam”, “bitcoin scam”, “bitcoin scam” … pic.twitter.com/ywlXoaxxo0
— PlanB (@100trillionUSD) July 16, 2020
Technically, Bitcoin could not be banned. Everyone can use it freely. But nothing can also stop the governments of the world to restrict it by imposing that Bitcoin companies could not operate in their jurisdictions. Just look at how the U.S. successfully forced Libra to break its global cryptocurrency initiative.
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