Celebrities whose Twitter accounts were hacked on Wednesday evening suffered no reputational damage. Elon Musk is fine, as is Barack Obama. Twitter promises to fix internal vulnerabilities that permitted the intrusion.
But because the scam was orchestrated by impostors who apparently promised Bitcoin to unsuspecting members of the public, the cryptocurrency industry is in the negative spotlight again. Dark stories of Bitcoin being used nefariously are retold. Again, the question arises: is there any justification for trusting that this decentralized currency will ever significantly
advance human society?
Naturally, the industry’s leaders are pushing back: “Bitcoin itself is not a scam. We really need to be careful about our language.”
That’s Damilola Odufuwa, the head of public relations for Binance, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world. Timi Ajiboye, founder and CEO of Nigeria-based BuyCoins, doesn’t see why it makes sense to blame all Bitcoin holders for the scam since the US Dollar is never to blame when advance-fee fraudsters fleece government agencies and football clubs.
The fact is that Bitcoin is having something of a good year in Africa. More companies like BuyCoins are pushing features to normalize its use. In a sense, a night of reputational heat may have helped promote Bitcoin’s value on the continent.
“The
perpetrators chose Bitcoin specifically because it is valuable and liquid,” Wiza Jalakasi, a Nairobi-based fintech specialist, tells me. He thinks this could actually be a moment for Africans to reflect: why do we continue to be tied to the dollar which the US Federal Reserve pumps out at will, at huge costs to our purchasing power? (For context, the Nigerian naira traded at 470 to 1 dollar on the parallel market yesterday).
Yes, this scam furthers a stereotype. But the crypto community can lead by sharing information and explaining technical details to users in simple forms, Jalakasi says. Maybe that’s the way to finally win monetary authorities and regulators over, and provide an alternative to fiat money.
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