Eileen Brown: Why do I get trolled when I write about Bitcoin SV?

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Why do journalists get complaints and abuse on social media just for mentioning Bitcoin SV?

Eileen Brown writes about the tech scene for ZDNet, and says the BSV effect is quite unique in her experience: “when I wrote about the [BSV] Genesis protocol upgrade, the trolling I received on Twitter lasted for nearly three weeks, and I never had that before.”

“What is it about Bitcoin SV that people hate so much?” Eileen asks. “They want to bully somebody like me into not attending [the CoinGeek conference], not writing about it. The trolling is amazingly vicious.”

Eileen says that as a journalist she is neutral between different cryptocurrency camps and has deliberately never owned any crypto. Rather than being intimidated by the trolling, Eileen is just interested: “it’s fascinating to watch, from a human perspective”.

But when it comes to explaining the motives behind it, she is very clear: “somebody, or some group of people, are heavily financially invested in making certain that Bitcoin SV does not succeed.”

Eileen has been trying out some of the BSV social media apps, and has noticed how differently they are making her behave: “it actually dramatically changed the way that I would post. I found I was less flippant. I was a lot more considered in the way that I posted. On Twetch, for example, if you post a ‘like’ or a ‘rebranch’ as it’s called, it costs you money. So you’re much more measured in what you decide to like”.

On Powping, tipping is voluntary, which Eileen has also enjoyed: “I find that if I ask a question and somebody gives me a reasonably measured answer, I will tip an amount that I think is the value of the response that I’ve been given. And the nice thing about this particular platform is that it tells you the complete amount of money that particular post has earned, not just for the creator, but anybody that looks at anybody’s posts can see the economy of that blog post was two dollars”.

For all her enthusiasm, Eileen believes the revolution isn’t going to happen overnight: “I think it’s going to take a while to change people’s behavior. If you remember back to about 2007, 2008, when Facebook released itself onto the general public and took itself out of universities, one of Facebook’s key mantras was ‘it’s free and always will be’. So we have a whole generation of people who’ve grown up in this Freakonomics environment: everything’s for free.” 

Eileen is impressed with BSV ideas about keeping a stable protocol for people to build on, so that the whole system isn’t “at the whim of some young person in his bedroom”. She compares it with the general adoption of HTTP for the Internet, over rivals like FTP, which still exist but are no longer widely used. 

Over the long term, Eileen is bullish about the prospects: “I think that in a few more years, once we’ve gone past the uncertainty and startup mentality of a lot of the Bitcoin SV projects, I think we’ll start to get enterprise stability across the whole protocol.” 

Hear the whole of Eileen Brown’s interview in this week’s CoinGeek Conversation podcast or catch up with other recent episodes: 

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