On January 10th, 2009, a single tweet changed the internet.

Hal Finney posted two words, “Running Bitcoin,” and Bitcoin Twitter was born.

Seventeen years later, that same social graph has helped onboard millions of people into Bitcoin.
It has watched an asset go from zero to over two trillion dollars.

It has helped shape the political and cultural currents that put a sitting U.S. president back in office in 2024.

Over the years Bitcoin Twitter had become a living network of education, memes, debate, and coordination.

Now, for the first time since the authoritarian censorship of the COVID era, it feels under threat.
For months, the Bitcoin community felt the walls closing in.

Engagement was cratering and reach was vanishing.

The list of accounts you spent years curating to get the best Bitcoin content simply stopped appearing in your feed.

If you engage with For You rage bait, your timeline fills with slop.

If you post too often, your reach evaporates.

If you stay inside your niche, the very communities that made this platform valuable, you slowly disappear from your own social graph.

On the anniversary of Hal’s famous tweet, the Head of Product at X, Nikita Bier, finally gave us the "why."
He claimed the community is "dying from suicide."

The product team at X is optimizing for "unregretted user minutes" by shoving generic political rage bait and MAGA-glazing in front of everyone while shadow-banning the niche communities that built this platform.

They have replaced the organic "simcluster,” where 90% of your feed came from people you actually chose to follow, with a homogenous soup of the lowest common denominator.

Nikita informed us that by replying "gm" or engaging too much in threads, users are hitting an invisible "reach meter" that exhausts their impressions for the day.

In other words, if you interact with your community, the algorithm will hide your posts.
That explanation detonated the timeline.

The backlash to Nikita’s post was so violent that the tweets were deleted within hours.
The fallout even forced Elon Musk’s hand.

Over the weekend, Elon announced that the entire X algorithm, including all code used to determine organic and advertising recommendations, will be open-sourced in 7 days.

This will be repeated every 4 weeks with comprehensive developer notes.

They are even bending over backwards to appease the “crypto” community.

Nikita announced "Smart Cashtags" that allow users to track real-time Bitcoin and crypto prices directly from the timeline.

They went so far as to hint at in-app crypto trading.

Bitcoiners were some of the first to build decentralized alternatives like Nostr to escape the algorithm.
But X remains the world’s town square.

It is where Bitcoiners can directly tell central bankers to have fun staying poor.

The algo may try to optimize us out of the front page, but Bitcoiners are used to having to fight to be heard.

17 years later, we’re still posting every day.

We are still running Bitcoin.