Inside The Reddit Forum That Wants To See Bitcoin Die

David Gerard has not a kind word to spare for any part of the $1.4 trillion cryptocurrency market. “It’s dumb nerd money that nerds use to try to rip each other off,” he says. Bitcoin in particular earns his ire. “Its history is a series of get-rich-quick schemes,” says Gerard, a 54-year-old IT administrator in London. He does not even have anything nice to say about the widely applauded technology underlying crypto, the digital ledger system known as the blockchain. “A pile of nonsense,” he concludes. 

He has amassed a modest Twitter following spouting off like this (13,300 followers) and has self-published several books on the subject (Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain and Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried To Take Over the Money). When Gerard wants to commune with other crypto haters, he heads over to a burgeoning corner of the web: a Reddit forum called Buttcoin, the name a suggestion that cryptocurrencies are, well, a waste of time. He often posts there several times a day and spends more time commenting on what the group’s other 63,000 members publish. “Every other Reddit about cryptocurrency is full of cultists! Or marketing shills. Or both,” he says.

Cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin have made millions for investors large and small and become popularized by such mainstream figures as Jack Dorsey, who has said he’d be working in cryptocurrency if he wasn’t running Twitter and Square—and, of course, Elon Musk. The Tesla CEO made a $1.5 billion Bitcoin investment earlier this year that prompted a spike in the currency's value and later sold some of his holdings to help his electric-vehicle company report a first-quarter profit. Crypto has legions of devoted fans but also an army of critics. And sometimes those lines blur: Musk turned on Bitcoin last month and triggered a plunge in its price by saying Tesla would no longer accept the currency as payment for its vehicles, citing "the rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels" by miners who create the currency with banks of computers that create blocks of verified transactions which are then added to the blockchain.

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