Despite declining cryptocurrency prices, the community continues to grow at an unprecedented rate, with Bitcoin’s subreddit reaching a major milestone of one million subscribers throughout the weekend. One of the most famous online Bitcoin communities, /r / Bitcoin was founded in September 2010, nearly two years after the Bitcoin White Paper was released.
The page is the largest online community with more than 10,000 users on the site at all times. The milestone comes at a time when Google searches for “Bitcoin” doubled since the beginning of November.
This is noteworthy because it coincided with the falling price of Bitcoin, whereas a spike in terms of search results in a price increase. Bitcoin finally broke the $6,150 level of downside support in early November, dropping to $3,450 after a prolonged low volatility period.
Volatility soon returned with the breach of support and annual lows, with not only the doubling of Google search terms, but also an influx of regulatory news, as the SEC began to clamp down on a number of ICOs, leading to a disadvantage in price cascade.
There were also bullish news in the last month, which again attracted interest in cryptocurrencies. News of Nasdaq listing Bitcoin futures and an increase in the capacity of the highly anticipated Lightning Network were also available.
Congrats r/Bitcoin, 1 million subscribers. [vid] https://t.co/25VdtKgGKf
— /r/Bitcoin (@RedditBTC) December 3, 2018
The description of the subreddit notes that they are “dedicated to Bitcoin, the currency of the Internet,” continuing:
“Bitcoins are issued and managed without any central authority whatsoever: there is no government, company, or bank in charge of Bitcoin. You might be interested in Bitcoin if you like cryptography, distributed peer-to-peer systems, or economics”
An alternative subreddit, known as “/r / btc,” was later created on the site to “foster and promote free and open Bitcoin discussion” in response to allegations that the moderators of the /r / Bitcoin forum were censoring certain topics, specifically discussing the increase in block size.
User “theymos,” the high – profile moderator of /r / bitcoin at the heart of the censorship dispute, also defended his alleged censorship by noting that “posts about anything especially emotionally-charged [such as the about the block size debate] will be deleted unless they introduce some very substantial new ideas about the subject.”
This explanation was countered by a dissenting redditor whose post received an upvote of 89%. He argued “How is the Bitcoin community supposed to build consensus to do a hard fork when the /r/bitcoin mods ban any discussion of a hard fork proposal that does not have consensus?”
Roger Ver, prominent Bitcoin hard fork advocate Bitcoin Cash (BCH), tweeted his own opinion that /r / Bitcoin is allegedly “completely censored and has been for nearly 3 years now.”
Bitcoin Cash itself was hard forked to solve the problem of scalability of Bitcoin. The block size of the altcoin is up to 8 megabytes (as opposed to one in the original Bitcoin blockchain). Just last month, Bitcoin Cash was hard-forked to two separate currencies, BCH and Bitcoin SV (BSV), as opposing factions failed to reach consensus on further protocol changes.
