Bitcoin Forum

Twitter hackers strike again! The twitter account of India's supreme leader Narendra Modi is hacked to seek bitcoin payment. But that's not the main problem! See below,

My dad was reading newspapers from his tab while having morning tea and suddenly uttered - "this bitcoin thing is ruining everything online" (definitely he used local language but it is the literal translation)!

While I immediately cleared his doubt about bitcoin but that's how majority of the common people have reacted because bitcoin is now associated with all small/major hacks happening worldwide!

Sometimes I really feel, it's good to have a centralized authority who can take corrective measures to protect the goodwill of bitcoin. We are loosing reputation fast! Sad to see such an innovation like Bitcoin loosing its reputation and credibility due to few mere miscreants!

Luckily we have you to correct the idea. I just hope that when Bitcoin is properly adopted, people would have the proper notion of what crypto is, and that as a medium, it has no fault in whatever right or wrong that has been done using it. It really is the case of how the ignorant ones are the ones that actually are believed by the majority, mainly due to their quantity. Not that I blame them, it isn't their fault for being ignorant though it would be great news if centralized authorities actually spoke up and cleared up the idea of how and what Bitcoin is.

Well, with how the majority of people relate "anonymity" to doing something wrong, I'm not really surprised. Though I do suppose with time, such a notion would probably be removed, but that would take a long time plus a lot of convincing. I just hope that central authorities would continue to take corrective measures as you said since if they were to oppose it, it'd be rather easy to persuade ignorant people into taking their side.

The thing is that all technology or anything for that matter which is useful will always good and bad actors around them ( look at all the controversies surrounding gene editing and such can we truly stop or delay progress for this reason ). We should not let the bad actors determine how we define bitcoin or let vested interests smear its reputation because there will never be a shortage of nefarious individuals/organizations, even assuming there was a centralized authority who could take corrective measures, who is to say that this authority would always be a good actor even if he started out as one.

But you are right in that vested interests will now attempt to use an event like this to try and curtail the spread of bitcoin in your country, if i recall the Indian government has never been that friendly towards crypto currency with the ban/ restrictions on it only being recently lifted.

Why are you calling him Supreme leader? He is the prime minister of India not a spiritual leader nor a dictator.


I do not think this hacking is affecting the image of Bitcoin. If these hackers would ask fiat will it affect the image of fiat?

Twitter hacks are more affecting Twitter's reputation and if such hacking keeps on happening most celebrities will move away for it.

Actually there is but its not what we called an authority but a party or should I say community of true bitcoiners. Reputation is really important and all who are experienced bad things on crypto will definitely stepped in and curse it especially bitcoin. But the truth is, its the people who are using the great tech for shamed not the bitcoin itself.

Bitcoin is created to help people to ease problem on financial struggle hence this kind of issues has been out. Twitter hackers should be really punished for using influential people to scam others.

The negative misconceptions of the masses concerning Bitcoin is just going to be nothing but temporary hurdles. They'll someday realize how every single existing technologies has downsides, and how actually important Bitcoin is.

..then they'll say that the price is already too high

More like saying it's good to have dictatorship to solve a problem. Centralization and dictatorship, they are basically thesame. Government is never meant to be centralized. We tolerated it for too long doesn't mean it's okay. It's about letting few people or a single person run a community/society without checks and balances by the community members. Is that OK? Such checks and balances make power decentralized.

If you want Bitcoin to be corrupted, just allow some group of people or a person control it, or do whatever they want without community participation. You will be encouraging lawlessness, secrecy, non-transparency, abuse of power, non-accountability, etc

Governments, with Bitcoin/crypto community members can regulate Bitcoin/crypto decentrally and together!

I think it doesn't need a central authority to protect the image of Bitcoin but perhaps we, as crypto enthusiasts could make a difference by sharing whatever knowledge we have on this emerging tech so that other people may understand even the basic concept about it.

We always could do grassroots information dissemination about BTC starting from our own family so that little by little, we could change people's perception about it in our own way.:)

I can confirm that many people thinks that way, but the community is very quick to correct the issue by reporting the truth about these hacks, it's an evolving technology and very profitable that hackers are targeting top personalities to use Bitcoin as a bait to scam people, the community  should unite to combat this misinformation.

I definitely believe he is a dictator leader and that's why I am calling him a supreme leader. You can have you own thought process and I can also have mine!


It doesn't work that way! Twitter's reputation is definitely is at stake because of all recent hacks. But the name of bitcoin is getting involved in every single hacking incidents happening worldwide. That's what I am more worried about.

Did you see Ripple is getting associated with such hacks? No! Because Ripple is a centralized cryptocurrency so the owner of Ripple can freeze any account where any criminal proceeds are being dumped.

This is because people blindly trust the newspapers and whatever these newspapers publish and mostly there isn't any bitcoin user around these people who could tell them the reality and how fiat and cash is also involved in the illegal activities and is most frequently used in the drug trades, but that never get published in these newspapers.
I assume it is the governments along with these multinational companies trying to have more bitcoins for themselves by giving negative information to the public and when these orgs would have filled their pockets then they would start supporting cryptocurrencies.  ;) ;D


No India is a democracy and he isn't a Dictator, there is a huge fanbase of PM Modi in India(although, I'm not one of those) and people also love him a lot.

Has Bitcoin ever had a reputation to the point that it can lose it this way? Do 9 good things in life and one bad thing, people will always remember some bad ones sooner - the same thing is with Bitcoin which is still haunted by Mt.Gox ghosts, and some other hacks left hanging in the air - and also ransomware+ various scams such as Electrum phishing or the hundreds of fake wallets that appear every day.

I think too much centralization is already involved in Bitcoin, I don't know what more should be done without Bitcoin losing what it really is. Twitter has proven to have very bad security experts, because any account can be hacked no matter how the user set their protection.


Well, you can't compare a centralized shitcoin with Bitcoin, they are two completely different worlds - the owner of each altcoin can do whatever he wants with that coin at any time, and that is the biggest disadvantage of such projects - absolute centralization.

If I were the supreme leader, I'd rather do a public announcement with regards the hack incident, apologize and then proceed to man hunting. That's it! Because if they will grant the hacker's demands, it definitely shows a sign of weakness of their government against cyber criminals. Besides, it was only a Twitter account, creating another one is not hard at all ;D.
Sad but true :-\. That's why we should also make extra efforts on educating them (clarifying and debunking every hoax) as the fraudsters became active as well. I guess that's the best thing we can do because the criminals seems unstoppable ~ change my mind.

This is the cons of decentralized, It is can be used by criminals for ransom without a trace. Let’s just accept that we can convince everyone to view Bitcoin with our own perspective because we different subjective reason. In your father case, he is thinking that BTC doesn’t exist there is no way that this hacker will be paid without a trace but for that already open minded about BTC. We view this as privacy protection.

There’s always a pros and cons in decentralization.

The only problem is the authority to apprehend criminals.  Without enough authoritative power, criminals will just laugh at these communities or groups.  At the end of the day with this supporting group, we still need authorities to regulate and apply laws so that this decentralized system won't fall under anarchy.

But what about the others who read the news and have some wrong thoughts about BTC? with no one can tell them that those assumptions are not right and Bitcoin is not for those purposes?

I think our dream to see bitcoin became one of the top used currency in the world will not become true until this kind of problem is solved.
Now I believe that our duty in this early era is to teach people the right usage of bitcoin and put correctly whenever scammers used BTC for their own evil intentions.

Forget about all the shit that happened, now we are in the fear that PM Modi will surely get more angry due to this act of crypto-hacks and will start banning all the crypto related transaction throughout India.

have you guys not noticed how he is going on strike against every distraction that come across for every youth in India?

He is clearing the air for sure. First he banned all the chinese android app, started boycott moment, then banned world's most popular game PUBG in the process.

I dont think that he will stop here. He is gonna screw the crypto currency related stuff throughout India in no time.  ;D

The only way we can do about this issue is to clear the doubt of many people who don't have enough knowledge in bitcoin. We can't blame others too because it's part of the system of bitcoin. Of course, someone would take advantage of its feature of being a decentralized digital currency.

The fact that the media doesn't deal with such scammers swiftly is a big problem because it adds up to the negative image of Bitcoin. But that's not the only thing, it's a combo. The first part of it is scammers asking cryptos from people and being quite successful at getting it. The second part is social networks failing to respond to these threats properly. The third is the media focusing so much attention on such negative episodes, but not on the positive or on simple negative things with banks/fiat. Finally, the fear of the unknown is built into us on a subconscious level because it helped to survive. Add to this a pattern recognition (confirmation bias), and you get a mix of things that make it very difficult to change one's mind on whether Bitcoin is bad per se.

Dont get too nervous on whats about going to happen because of this Twitter incident. Perhaps PM Modi would be open minded enough not to persecute

cryptocurrencies or any emerging technologies for that matter that could potentially give benefits to his country. Imho.

It's always bad to have negative publicity, even if it's not very big, it all adds up in the long run, and there's not much positive news that can reach regular people. I doubt that anyone outside of crypto heard about the Pineapple fund, for example. Even Bitcoin's price rise isn't necessarily viewed as a positive, outsiders would simply not care. I hope that in the future Bitcoin will be more associated with opportunities for earning and spending money rather than scams and darknet markets.

Publicity for increasing bitcoin in the public circulation is still low and almost all hacking crimes are linked to cryptocurrency. In fact, the news has no impact. If you know, there has been a lot of wallet hacking news before, but the fact is that bitcoin prices are still on the rise.

There will always be that kind of misconception about bitcoin especially when it's always about the negative side with bitcoin-related that they see on the media. We all know that media can affect people's perceptions based on what they report, but at least you enlighten and corrected your dad about bitcoin. Since that's what they often hear about bitcoin, they'll start to doubt bitcoin and think of it as something bad. But if there's someone to educate them then they will realize that bitcoin isn't the one ruining things online.

Nothing is going to stay strong until it faces criticism, surely it damages the reputation of bitcoin but atleast more people might heard about the word bitcoin so they will understand what it is created for when legitimate payment methods accepted somewhere in their country.

Adoption and public image are not strongly and immediately correlated with price movements. The speculators don't care about small news, and rightfully so, because it would have been very risky and pointless to trade basing on them. What I'm saying is all those things add up in the long run, if regular people only heard Bitcoin being mentioned in negative light, and if it happened frequently, they would be less likely to adopt it, and would probably support their government banning it.

Yes that's right Social account hacking is a concern but it should not blame bitcoin or cryptocurrency industry.
Before crypto world there were hackers who hacks social accounts and even bank accounts etc.
The main thing is you can't blame bitcoin for hacking, for security you can change your social media account password frequently which will reduce chances of getting hacked.

Bitcoin is not failing and smart people won't detain from purchasing Bitcoin because hackers are requesting ransoms denominated in cryptocurrency. You can actually track those Bitcoins if they go to a big exchange and trace them if using a forensic analyst. This tool has its own limitations, but the hack could be solved by simply emailing Twitter and going through a verification process. But that is not really the problem, isn't it? The root of this happenings over the internet is a lack of knowledge in basic cybersecurity. That should be addressed first in the Information Age.

We dont need that centralized authority yet Bitcoin doesnt really need such stuff and let those people do say what they like yet we as supporters do knows the truth and later on people would able
to tell for themselves that they are actually on the wrong side or in wrong perception on things. Most people that do say these lines are the ones who do have zero knowledge towards it
but when the time comes that they do able to know even on the basics then those kind of commentaries will be changed up.Adoption is on the move and these kind of reputation ruining scenarios is
somewhat common on this market.It do really give some dismayed feeling but it is part of the reality to face off.

We cannot blame people who think negatively of Bitcoin. Moreover, they are ordinary people who have no knowledge of Bitcoin.
Will be prejudiced against Bitcoin with a lot of news about hacked twitter accounts. It really damages reputation of Bitcoin. And if
people misunderstand like that, it's hard to convince them Bitcoin isn't bad. But we shouldn't give up on explaining that Bitcoin is
not as bad as they think.

The previous hacker attack on Twitter shows that twitter is not a total secure social media and a part of me always feel sad everytime i hear about some hackers using Bitcoin as their way to steal from innocent people cause negative news spread fast than positive and the question I asked myself sometime is that could the government have something to do with this because we never can tell since 90% of them never support the idea of Bitcoin?
In the meantime, lets hope this issue dont lead to complications in India.

ah i see so your saying that the main issue is its impact to the people  . in my case i dont consider what others think aa a main issue but for me the main issue here is the supreme leader that have been hacked because he is more influencial than a regular people .

people complain as if they have a business on crypto but  no they havent because if they have , they will know that btc has nothing to do with the scamming .

This time it is Indian prime minister's twitter account. Another thing, the hack is associated with the Twitter account for relief fund. Promotion for cryptocurrency from the Twitter account of a country's prime minister is really interesting. This is being done by a team, and some states it is done by a person. Now this information has made more people know about cryptocurrency. Following this incident the government can also take action against cryptocurrency usage.

I would not be surprised if these hacks are linked to government sanctioned hacking operations. India has been on the wire for many years, when it came to Crypto currencies and a hack like this will just push things in the wrong direction.  >:(

I hope they catch these guys soon, because Twitter is ruining all the good work that we have done over the years to get Bitcoin where it is today. The thing is, centralized platforms like this are not blamed for these embarrassing incidents... Bitcoin is taking all the heat for this.  >:(

The hack didn't happened just for bitcoin. The hackers found a vulnerability on twitter and exploited it to gain access. Of everything they could have done, they asked for bitcoins. It's actually the twitter that's unsafe. Bitcoin has just made it easier for people to send and receive value without any difficulty in transaction. With so much issues on the side of twitter, it asks us to move towards a decentralized solution.

Hacker is asking to deposit BTC in a ETH wallet ?? ??? ???

https://i.imgur.com/iXNx7SF.jpg

I am quite surprised to see that twitter is unable to stop the hackers, and they are continuously  hacking one by one twitter accounts.

What do you think they did? Of course it will be on news, authorities will do some investigation, cyber checking and then will hunt the man down. The supreme leader don't have to do it by himself, he don't need to appear on TV just because of this, the media will do the work here. Besides, he is not the one who handles the twitter account most likely it is a secretary's job.

I can't really see where you are getting this, it is just a matter of shallow thing. Government will not give anything of what the hacker asked for, they are not fools, coz the only thing that the hacker can get from twitter is his followers. Now what they can do is to warn people as soon as possible about the incident, report the incident to twitter support and let the account be recovered. No need to create a new at all, once twitter confirms this, they can easily get it back.

This is no longer an issue concerning bitcoins or cryptocurrencies in general but rather Twitter being not that secure at all. It’s obvious that hackers would target prominent personalities since they know that people would actually be gullible enough to send some money on their way when needed. Though luckily, the hackers aren’t too bright at all asking for bitcoin donations on what appears to be an ETH address.

Just expect things like this will happen more and more in the future until Twitter finally updates their system and actually protect user data.

Popular people (especially those who already have an official account verification) will never publicly collect money, and if they do, it will be confirmed by video or at least duplicated to other accounts of this person. If you only see a post on Twitter or instagram or any other social network-know this Scam.

We should not get too hesistant to tell everybody that bitcoin is not a scam or it function because efforts might be put to waste if were going to act like this. The best thing we should do is to keep always an update with bitcoin. Let establishment work for the slow adapatation of cryptocurrency for some of the establishment are already integrating bitcoin as an option for payments. Slowly in phase or manner of adaption but for me it is very effective or efficient. I hope that other company will do as well to chose bitcoin as an option for payment.

It will be too late for them to realize what is Bitcoin when the price is already in the highest peak. Sadly, these wrongdoings of hackers making a very bad reputation to the Bitcoin community but if you've come to think about it. Fiat is used too in bad deeds so why bother these people who does bad things. And also the media is always aiming the bad news for more views than aiming the good news.

At first I thought that Bitcoin's reputation could be tarnished by these hacker attacks. But I no longer think so, hackers have been considered cyber criminals who are looking to profit monetarily.

More often, new platforms based on blockchain are being seen inviting them to find vulnerability to be rewarded.I think that this would be a good future for them to earn rewards by finding vulnerability.

As for Twitter, how long do we have to wait for a secure platform?

Never. Central authorities lead to abuse, period. Its the fundamental problem: If they can, someday they will. So what if a few criminals use it? Isn't the majority of crime done with fiat? Bitcoin even leaves more traces.

A central authority is the very reason the fiat of any country can lose its value. In fact the same applies to crypto, all the other altcoins that depend in a single person or small group. The beauty of Bitcoin is that no such thing exists so its value won't disappear overnight from a decision of the supreme leader. Even if Satoshi returned he cannot destroy it anymore, and that's what makes it valuable.

If you want to kill the value of a coin, do exactly what you propose. Heck my country made one but nobody wants it. My country also has the worst fiat in the world, because rather than fixing the economy, our "supreme leader" decided that everything is a capitalist lie and there is absolutely nothing wrong with "printing" to pay debt and the Americans are always at fault.

Loosing reputation fast? You must be new. 11 years of that but Bitcoin is only gaining better and better reputation. Only some older people would say things like that, people who can't bother to learn of something new since they absolutely trust what they already know; until they see everybody else saying otherwise.

What has "hacking" the Supreme Leader Twitter account to do with anything? NOTHING. Why are you not protesting your authority for the use of Twitter to begin with? And what foolish thing they did to let the account get taken? Probably they used an idiot password or had some aide managing it, which is so typical. They should have not been using Twitter in the first place. There is your problem, your Leader, not Bitcoin, and those who follow them.

Twitter security seems to have many loopholes so that hackers can still hack it to give negative news about bitcoin by using twitter accounts of important people like Narendra Modi as India's supreme leader.

Currently there are many FUDs scattered about bitcoin so that bitcoin has experienced a fairly drastic price drop. The general public will certainly respond to this and judge Bitcoin as the destroyer of everything in the online world transactions.

Need to be careful and must do news filtering. do not easily believe news that is not clear even if it is from celebrity accounts or accounts of important people in this world.

Decentralization has its own disadvantages and every disadvantage can take advantage of people in a bad way. Hackers are taking advantage of it as a gateway to collect money from their victims, This is why the reputation of crypto is being damaged. This might be a temporary problem but this can possibly lead to big problems. Unfortunately it the banning of Chinese apps in India and the hacking occurred in the same week.

Twitter should make their security better or else this kind of fud will spread more.

It happens to anyone who is not aware of the market, your Dad was not aware of the market and he had no idea about bitcoin but that does not mean that we need a central authority to do what, many real players in bitcoin was attracted because of its decentralized nature and if people could understand the basic that the medium used in a scam is not the problem but the scammers who is trying to take advantage of gullible people.

Hope you are referring to the major twitter hack happened in the past month, but to give Narendra Modi the supreme leader title is a bit overblown as India is a democratic country, if you are being sarcastic because he is selling all the public sector companies which could affect millions of government jobs in the future and driving the economy to a record negative GDP then the reference would be appropriate as he is doing everything as supreme dictator.

I had this conversation with my Dad back in 2013 as he came to me to understand about the market side of things and since he was interested in the stock market he was eager to understand the new market and hence he will never have these kinds of doubts, what i am trying to tell is anyone who traded stock bonds or any commodity will understand that BTCitcoin market is almost similar like the rest of the market but the major difference is the decentralization and the market is open round the clock.

Wont be surprised that Twitter might really lose its popularity if these security breaches would be common or cant really be solved out.They might be taken it too lightly but one day if users would really be done enough
into this platform then they would surely regret it.

This issue havent still resolved yet? If this would keep on happening then maybe its time to leave that Twitter and look for another good alternative.

It might not be that simple to jump to other service but for sure there would really be one that would just pop out and much better in terms of security.

It's just a question on what better alternatives do we have right now? Twitter is one of the top social media platforms that we have today and it's been used by many people, including government officials to make an official announcement.

So if there is another platform, then why not? But if none, then as much as we hate Twitter because of the recent massive breach we've witnessed, it will still be the go to micro-blogging platform. So they better improved their security.

Bitcoin isn't losing its reputation nor its credibility. That reputation has been sticked to it even before bitcoin has been recognized by the mainstream. We can't stop those people that are thinking like that. They are not completely aware of what bitcoin is and they will still think the same even if our governments will recognize and appreciate the good use of bitcoin.

They recognize the hacks and scams that asks bitcoin but they are not calling out those scams and hacks that uses cash or fiat with those thefts.  It is new and that's why they only recognize bitcoin with bad news.

Actually this was not already a new issue against Bitcoin for we are already get used to it that people are having that notion that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are always the reason why hackings, scammings and money laundering are taking place in the online world which gives wrong ideas or misconception what the reality is happening beyond those cases. The problem in here is that media is giving false information with much exaggeration of what the reality must be which gives bad impression about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies as a whole. People's mind are being manipulated on what they are reading on news articles even though they still do not know anything about Bitcoin at all. That was basically mere and bare judgement that sticks into the mind of people making them afraid of adaption because of what they think Bitcoin is associated with wrong doings because of other people's fault added by the influence of the mass media which makes it difficult for an ordinary people to understand what is the real deal about Bitcoin.

With regards to hacking of Twitter account by the leader of India, there is also a recent case that involves hacking of Twitter accounts of famous personalities which I think would make bad popularity for Twitter because there is consecutive related hackings on their platform which they must come into action to resolve such issue not to happen again.

Those scams that uses Bitcoin's name surely affects the reputation and the credibility of bitcoin towards the view of people who don't know it, first impression really matters and if they only hear about it, it will take too long until the adaption and acceptance of people towards it become possible, and the government can't also blindly support it but if they  want it to become accepted, rather than putting negative news about it maybe they need to persuade or either say something positive about it.

Though, it's unfortunate seeing what's happening to bitcoin as bad; and that which is affecting it reputation fast as you have said. This isn't true because many without the right knowledge about bitcoin will always be victim of scam. Scammers likewise operate with fiats and many gullibles fall for their tricks, Fiat's reputation isn't decreasing, so also with bitcoin when time comes. For the centralized support to curb scam with bitcoin won't work and not acceptable, neutral entity can be manipulated against the community but making the community to serve such purpose is better.

Scammers are everywhere. Whenever it is possible to do it, on whatever platform and through any medium, they will do it. It sure does affect the reputation of Bitcoin and it is no secret that it is seen as a SCAM in general for those who don’t know what it is. It is the fact that they are not educated about this that’s why they believe these things in the first place. And the government won’t really persuade people to use Bitcoin since they do not have a hold and control over it.

BTCBTCMore like saying it's good to have dictatorship to solve a problem. Centralization and dictatorship, they are basically thesame. Government is never meant to be centralized. We tolerated it for too long doesn't mean it's okay. It's about letting few people or a single person run a community/society without checks and balances by the community members. Is that OK? Such checks and balances make power decentralized.