This Dave Portnoy figure was completely unknown to me until he tweeted about Bitcoin. It was a strange video of him ranting about what Bitcoin is and if he could mine it on the internet with some plastic hammer he held or something similar, (I don't even remember what I saw, it wasn't significant anyway). The continuation was strange though as in his next video Portnoy was asking the Winklevoss twins to visit him and explain Bitcoin and how it works. At some point, it was obvious that the whole thing was a staged ad that included affiliate promotions to Portnoy's 1,7 million twitter followers.
Not only the Winklevoss twins failed to present a decent case for Bitcoin, but the next day they've also proceeded with asking him to promote Chainlink, a controversial shitcoin when it was right on the top of a bubble. So Portnoy told his followers to buy an ERC20 token that was at the top of the pump 'n dump phase. Was this all random and happened spontaneously out of the Winklevoss pure love for alternative cryptocurrencies? Why ask him to talk about LINK anyway? It is looking carefully planned as well.
Now I don't blame Portnoy for this, he does not care about Bitcoin or his followers. I care about how ridiculous crypto twitter has become, how terrible all of this was handled and that three years after the whole shitcoin bubble phase we haven't learned a thing.
There are people on twitter that have Bitcoin bags and just want to shill them. I get it. Honestly, I wish I also wasn't strict and went all-in in March instead of buying the dip but small. Some people make sense and then there are some that just because they bought a tonn of random altcoins they unleash thousands of paid shills to promote them. The moment people that used to be just about Bitcoin started shilling DeFi, Chainlink, Band, Compound, yield farming, etc. it becomes very disappointing.
Bitcoin is not taken seriously this way. Gemini lost a lot of points by shilling a shitcoin, Binance is not respected outside the crypto space and Coinbase is close to becoming Bittrex with the number of shitcoins they've added.
It is their business model but perhaps they should understand that they should stop harming Bitcoin by reducing it to the same level as alts. At least exchanges should pretend that they are following the rules. Pump 'n dumps are not the rules. The financial world is observing these mistakes that keep happening for years. The CEO's of cryptocurrency exchanges are major crypto influencers and should be very careful about promoting anything else besides Bitcoin unless they want to damage both Bitcoin and their businesses. The damage to Bitcoin won't be permanent though as we've learned from the case of Mt.Gox.
Most of us remember the phrase from Wolf of Wall Street: "Once we've suckered them in, we unload the dog shit". I thought that the whole community and especially exchanges were trying to call themselves financial institutions and escape the quick cash-grab logic. Is this really what they want?