In a mass Twitter hack, 130 celebrity accounts were compromised and the hackers stole over $100K from the victims. Some of the accounts that were hacked include, Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Barack Obama, Warren Buffet, Apple, Bloomberg, Kanye West, and others.
The hackers targetted high profile accounts along with many accounts associated with crypto like Vitalik Buterin and Justin Sun. Every account tweeted that they were doing a giveaway and asked people to send Bitcoin to receive double of what they send. Anyone who had a slight knowledge of crypto should have known that it is a scam but unfortunately, many people fell for this.
Many people are calling Bitcoin a scam after this incident but they fail to understand that Twitter was hacked, not Bitcoin. They don't know that Bitcoin can not be hacked. The fault lies in Twitter, not Bitcoin. No one blamed airplanes for 9/11 and no one should blame Bitcoin for Twitter hack.
Why Is This Hack Good For Decentralized Social Media
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There are reasons why I think that this might work in the benefit of decentralized social media :
Those 130 accounts that were hacked yesterday have billions of followers and there is a strong possibility that hundreds of millions of people would be aware of the hack by now. Since each account mentioned Bitcoin, more people came to know about Bitcoin. Bitcoin was number one trending topic on Twitter yesterday. Of course, only a small percentage of users will do the research about Bitcoin but still, the number would be enough.
People who really understand and take their privacy seriously will start looking for decentralized social media and that's where they will come to know about Hive, Steem, Uptrend, Publish0x, and others. They might end up making accounts on these social media platforms and some of them might invest the money as well.
If they like these platforms, they will spread the word and we might end up benefiting a lot from this.
These are some of the reasons why the Twitter hack might be good for decentralized social media but at the same time all the above-mentioned platforms are blogging platforms and these platforms still lack a ton of features. We still don't have a powerful and feature-rich microblogging decentralized social media platform.
With that said, we might still benefit from this mass Twitter hack if everything goes our way. Twitter, on the other hand, announced last year that they are funding a small team that will work on creating a decentralized version of Twitter. More details about that can be found in this tweet from Jack Dorsey. If Twitter creates a decentralized version, I will be more than happy to use it.
This is not financial advice. These are personal thoughts and they are meant for information purposes only.DYOR before investing.
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This hack did not hurt bitcoin, and its effects will hardly hurt bitcoin.
A similar scam has been operated on YouTube. Over the past 2 months or so, seemingly live videos with Musk and other big names have been uploaded to YouTube with the same offer to double your bitcoin.
For anybody with a bit of knowledge of the space, it's a blatant scam. But for those newbies who are still uneducated about cryptos, I bet the scammers got them to send plenty of bitcoin to them, with no reply. Sad.
I don't know why is YouTube allowing such ads to run.
The frequency of these ada is only increasing and whenever I open YouTube, those ads show up.
I really feel sorry for those people who got scammed.
Good point. YouTube will delete vids of people expressing their opinions, but will not delete vids of scammers scamming innocent people.
What happened with twitter is something that surprises btc users since anyone with a medium knowledge of the ecosystem could smell the scam from miles away. I guess it was the social engineering used to convince them that it worked
At the moment many fingers are being pointed out but a proper investigation is required to bring forward the truth.