Bitcoin Giant Bitmain Sees Israeli Offices Vandalized with Posters
Bitmain offices vandalized with posters in protest - source twitter.
For the first time in bitcoin’s on-going two years old scalability “debate,” three bitcoiners have taken physical action by entering a public area of the Israeli Offices of Bitmain and plastering it with hard-hitting posters. Gadi Glikberg a VP International Sales & Marketing BitmainTech Manager, publicly stated :
“During the last weekend, at nighttime, while the office was closed and we were away, he infiltrated the building where our office is and decided to go on a good old fashion vandalism streak, posting messages threatening our employees.”
An online video shows flyers being posted under office doors by three individuals. They further plastered them around the premises, including the car park area which seems to have been fully empty at the time.
It’s not clear whether Glikberg is referring to the above as threatening or whether there were other unpublished acts, but he says they were undertaken by Nadav Ivgi, founder of Bitrated, a bitcoin start-up which says they establish chargeback like functions for bitcoin payments through establishing reputation in a web of trust manner by building “a layer of trust on top of blockchain technology.”
Ivgi publicly stated that “the protest took place only in the public areas of the building, none of the protesters entered any offices or other restricted areas.”
Further, Ivgi stated in conversation with CCN.com:
“None of the flyers had any words of threats. This is not our way. The bitcoin activists that participated in the protest are peaceful and would never take part in threats, violence or any other illegal activity. The local bitcoin community have experience with similar protests against Israeli banks and corrupted officials, and this has always been a red line that was never crossed.
The protest in question took place in the public areas of building that’s freely accessible to the public. None of the protesters entered any offices, Bitmain’s private property, or any other restricted areas. The posters were put up with blu-tack, which is easy to remove and leaves no marks.
Additionally, the meeting that Gadi is referring to took place more than a year ago. The protest was organized by the local bitcoin community to criticize Bitmain’s actions and policies, and had nothing to do with that meeting or with Gadi personally.”
The three men, who appear to be in late teenage years or early twenties, did seem to be only sticking posters up, but the act follows some online history between Glikberg and Ivgi, according to the former, who says Ivgi had been very vocal online against Bitmain. The two publicly debated the issues, but that appears to have not led to any changes.
Glikberg says:
“The attacks kept coming, even got personal at times. I disengaged. What’s the point of talking if there’s no one listening?… I left an open invitation to Nadav and anyone else that’s interested in talking to come visit our office, have coffee, and discuss.
But coffee and discussion was not what he was after. As we stopped responding online and did not engage, he decided to escalate.”
That escalation was in the form of putting up some very polished hard-hitting political posters which appear to be the work of a marketing agency as they seem to be very professional in appearance.
Some may, therefore, wonder who paid for these posters which must have taken considerable time to design, and, whether the three men were genuine activists or paid to engage in a political campaign which may now look very similar to actual politics of camp Hillary or camp Trump.
Bitcoin Elections?
A very sad state of affairs for the platform some dared call the people’s money, a label which is becoming more and more deserving for that other platform where they talk about an industrial revolution rather than petty 1MB storage space which was first provided as far back as 1986 when the first 1.3MB floppy disks shipped.
Even more depressing is the increasing awareness that some sections of bitcoin’s community, including prominent developers, appear to have completely forgotten about the breakthrough solution to the question of “how do we measure what the economic majority supports?”
But maybe they never believed bitcoin’s consensus system can work and perhaps always thought it is far better to have team Hillary and team Trump, with crowds shouting big blocks or small blocks, in a theatrical circus.
Because that’s all that’s left in the bitcoin land as the best, the builders, the thinkers, the visionaries, have long gone to greener pastures, where the crowds shout “smart contracts,” “where is Tesla,” “muh lambo,” “gib flying car.”
The concluding thought goes to companies like Bitmain which, unlike many – including businesses, developers, users – actually have no choice but to engage with the circus. They can’t say they were not warned, but no one feels good when they say “I told you so.”
Although, frankly, the miners are not without blame. 30% of them continue to not signal for any solution. The rest of them took two years to make a decision when they should have done so in weeks. However, if we start opening the blame game it’s a very, very, long list, including all bitcoiners collectively.
Featured image from Twitter.
