Hello! This was a false positive in our systems at @ChainPatrol. We are retracting the takedown request, and will conduct a full post-mortem to ensure this does not happen again.

We have been combatting a huge volume of fake YouTube videos that are attempting to steal user funds. Unfortunately, in our mission to protect users from scams, false positives (very) occasionally slip through.

We are actively working to reduce how often this happens, because it's never our intent to flag legitimate videos. We're very sorry about this! Will keep you posted on the takedown retraction.

I learned yesterday the video I made in 2017 explaining how Bitcoin works was taken down, and my channel received a copyright strike (despite it being 100% my own content).

The request seems to have been issued by a company chainpatrol, on behalf of Arbitrum, whose website says they "makes use of advanced LLM scanning" for "Brand Protection for Leading Web3 Companies"

I could be wrong, but it sounds like there's a decent chance this means some bot managed to convince YouTube's bots that some re-upload of that video (of which there has been an incessant onslaught) was the original, and successfully issue the takedown and copyright strike request.

It's naturally a little worrying that it should be possible to use these tools to issue fake takedown requests, considering that it only takes 3 to delete an entire channel.

Update: with help from YouTube, the video is now restored: https://youtu.be/bBC-nXj3Ng4

I was personally never too worried. I'm fortunate enough to have a large audience and contacts within YouTube. However, it remains noteworthy to me that bots can do this, especially on behalf of those who lack easy access to recourse.