Bitcoin Cash feud deepens as famous @Bitcoin Twitter account mysteriously disappears

It's not clear why the mysterious account was taken offline

Twitter’s suspension of the popular cryptocurrency news account @Bitcoin has fuelled speculation that it relates to a long-running feud in the bitcoin community.

The account was suspended over the weekend before the handle was transferred to a different user. It was eventually returned to its original owner but with 750,000 fewer followers.

The anonymous owner of the @Bitcoin account is a proponent of Bitcoin Cash, a rival cryptocurrency to bitcoin that was established following disagreements about bitcoin could support the huge numbers of people who want to use it.

Online speculation about why the account was temporarily suspended centres on the theory that supporters of the original cryptocurrency may have reported the account to Twitter for either posting spam or impersonating someone else.

Bitcoin Cash detractors have previously called for people to report the “fake @Bitcoin account,” with some speculating that prominent bitcoin figure Roger Ver is behind the account.

Mr Ver, who was an early bitcoin investor, tweeted on Monday: “I’ve never owned the @Bitcoin account. It is owned by someone involved in Bitcoin since 2009. He supports #BCH, is well known in the Bitcoin ecosystem, but doesn't want to deal with incessant trolling so he has chosen not to make his identity public.”

A Twitter spokesperson said: “We don’t comment on individual accounts for privacy and security reasons.”

Once reinstated to the original owner, the @Bitcoin account tweeted: "I'd like to know why my account was given to someone else, and then when it's reinstated I'm missing 750,000 of my followers. Any word, @jack [Dorsey]?"

The account went on to note that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is an investor in Lightning Labs, a startup developing a solution to bitcoin’s scalability issues.

Dorsey recently made the bold claim that bitcoin would be the world’s “single currency” within the next decade, despite the fact that slow transaction times and increasing costs mean it is not currently a very effective currency.

“The world ultimately will have a single currency, the internet will have a single currency,” Dorsey told The Times in March. “I personally believe it will be bitcoin.”