It's Time to Talk About Crypto Twitter

Twitter serves as the voice of the crypto world, but sometimes that voice is strangely distorted.

Twitter is where we debated the Bitcoin Cash hard fork, reacted to Bill Clinton's presence onstage at a Ripple conference and drowned our sorrows in bear market memes.

What holds sway over crypto Twitter: innovation or invective? Do the endless debates on Twitter ever account for positive change? Or are they mere generators of memes and fury?

Many readers here will be familiar with some of the more popular memes and hashtags in crypto Twitter.

Besides constantly pitting one crypto project or ideology against another, hashtag wars offer bad actors convenient entry into cryptocurrency.

How many scammers have attempted bot-powered pump-and-dump schemes? How many identity thieves have latched onto fake Twitter handles and domain names in hopes of quick paydays from slow learners?

What might an optimal crypto Twitter look like?

For me, one of the best things I saw on Twitter in 2018 was a debate between Ari Paul and Murad Mahmudov.

Even the most intransigent bitcoin maximalist, for example, must admit that Vitalik Buterin's Twitter presence is impressive.

While some responsibility for improving the dialogue on Crypto Twitter may fall to Twitter itself - they can "Shadow ban" and make it difficult to discover tweets by bad actors and probable trolls, such as the "Giving away ETH" bots - the hardest, and most important work must be done by the cryptocurrency community.