Bitcoin Cash proponent Roger Ver speaks on social media manipulation and its relation to cryptocurrency space

Recently, Roger Ver, the CEO of Bitcoin.com and an early adopter of Bitcoin [BTC], spoke about social media manipulation and its relation to the cryptocurrency ecosystem.

Ver began by speaking about the 50 Cent Party, also known as the 50 Cent Army and its correlation to cryptocurrencies. It is a group of commentators controlled by the Chinese authorities to manipulate the peoples’ viewpoint in favor of the authority.

It was created in the initial stage of the Internet and the authority paid 50 cents Renminbi to the commentators. This was for commenting or posting articles in favor of the authority, with an intention to diverge the publics’ attention from important news which would generally be against the authority.

Ver stated that this is similar to several comments in the cryptocurrency community. He said:

“If you go and look at a lot of popular things, you will see all sorts of comments from people who don’t even necessarily seem to be people”

This was followed by Ver connecting the present scenario to the one which took place in the month of June 2011. During that timeframe, the price of BTC witnessed a surge for the first time where it from $2 to over $30. This resulted in the whole community flooding Bitcointalk.org with comments related to the upward and downward trend of the price, he stated.

Ver continued to say:

“… there was no depth in the conversation and it turned overnight, [from what] used to be a wonderful platform for discussion of Bitcoin, into just a bunch of nonsense and fluff and it wasn’t even usable at all at that point.”

The CEO associated this with the comments present on Zhou Tong’s post on BitcoinTalk.org. Tong is the Founder of Bitcoinica, a cryptocurrency exchange which shut down as the platform was compromised to a hack in May 2012. This led to the Founder existing the cryptocurrency space and posting it on BitcoinTalk.

To this, Ver stated that there are probably bots who continue to comment on the post to date and flooding the thread with “fluff”. He went on to say that if they were actual people, then they “know nothing about Bitcoin” and are paid for farming these accounts in order to use them to propagate their interests in the future.

He said:

“… and it is happening all over the cryptocurrency ecosysytem. I’m sure it’s not just happening to Bitcoin Cash ecosystem, it’s happening all over the place, but Bitcoin Cash specifically… One time Adam Black, the CEO of Blockstream eluded to the fact that it is a full-time job of a whole bunch of people to, I think he put it as like, dispel the myths or something like that online.”

Furthermore, Ver spoke about being accused of hiring a group of people to promote Bitcoin Cash. The Bitcoin Cash proponent outrightly denied the allegations and added that someone in the space is involved in such activities to attack Bitcoin Cash.

Roger added that this act of manipulation has resulted in several people in the space believing that Bitcoin Cash is a scam and that Bitcoin was not “meant to be for used on-chain for payments for things like coffee”.