Bitcoiner Simon Dixon on bankruptcies and Elon Musk: Hall of Flame – Cointelegraph Magazine
5 min read
Name: Simon Dixon
Anonymous: No
Twitter Followers: 109.1K
Known for: Co-founder of Bank To The Future and the dude who wrote the first-ever published book on Bitcoin.
Who is this guy anyway?
Simon Dixon is a true Bitcoin O.G. He is the author of the first-ever published book on Bitcoin in the world Bank to the Future, which was released in February 2012, and has splashed over $1 billion in cash investing in “over 100” different crypto companies, including Kraken, Ripple Labs and — err — Celsius.
Dixon stumbled upon Bitcoin when he was “deep in debt” after his ambitious attempt to start a traditional bank didn’t go to plan. “I failed at that task,” he admits.
Instead of throwing in the towel, Dixon eventually founded BnkToTheFuture, an online investment platform that crowdsources private equity funding, giving smaller-scale investors who can satisfy regulatory requirements in their own countries access to early-stage but risky tech VC-style opportunities, with Celsius, Kraken, Bitfinex and Securitize among them.
In recent times, he has “accidentally become the Chapter 11 guy” as he seems to have psychic powers in predicting what crypto firm is going to go into Chapter 11 next.
“I was telling everyone that Celsius was going to go bankrupt before it went [bankrupt]. I was the one calling out Digital Currency Group as a company that’s probably going to go bankrupt. I [predicted] that BlockFi [would] go into Chapter 11.”
What led to Twitter fame?
Dixon built his 109,000 following organically and says he has “never really invested significant time into providing content for people.” But he’s been “advocating for Bitcoin since 2011,” and his followers grew over the years through sharing content on “building and protecting your wealth using Bitcoin,” and he says Bitcoin personally “transformed” all his finances in life.
In recent times, he has seen an influx of followers due to his advocacy for victims who have lost their savings in recent crypto exchange bankruptcies, especially those from Celsius.
“This one was such a level of fraud that I couldn’t keep quiet.”
What to expect in his Twitter content
While Dixon continues to provide useful Bitcoin content for the crypto community, recently, he’s been advocating for “more and more people in these Chapter 11 Bankruptcies.”
“I started sharing content on how you can optimize these bankruptcy proceedings to make the most for creditors, and that seemed to lead to a lot of people wanting to join me on Twitter Spaces.”
Check out the shots fired at FTX through simple arts and craft work on a newspaper article.
He is often seen motivating those who are losing hope of ever getting their funds back from Celsius.
Dixon even managed to get Elon Musk on the infamous Twitter Space when he was “covering the FTX crash live” as investors were suspending withdrawals.
It was chaos, as Musk had “just completed the acquisition” of Twitter, too.
Dixon took advantage of the opportunity to ask Musk if “there was any place for Bitcoin on Twitter.”
“He was only meant to be there for 30 minutes. He actually stayed on the space for about an hour.”
Oh yeah, and from time to time, he posts about his casual hangs with world leaders.
Here is Dixon pictured hanging out with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele.
Twitter Likes
Dixon likes to follow people on Twitter who actually have a passion for crypto through the good and bad times, not those just trying to make a buck from shilling shitcoins.
“I’m interested in people that have remained consistent to Bitcoin when it’s not cool to be consistent to Bitcoin.”
Dixon said that he is a big fan of the “old school” Andreas Antonopoulos, as he doesn’t get as “much credit as he deserves today.”
He said that Antonopoulos did a lot of the hard work explaining Bitcoin in its early days, “when it was very hard to explain to people.”
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Twitter Beefs
Top Quality Beef: Alex Mashinsky
Despite Dixon’s high profile, he hasn’t had a lot of public feuds.
This isn’t surprising considering he is a fairly nice and well-mannered dude.
His one and only public beef is with the former CEO of the now-defunct crypto lending exchange Celsius, Alex Mashinsky.
After the collapse of Celsius, Mashinsky was told by his lawyers that “he’s not allowed to talk,” according to Dixon.
Dixon’s commentary on the Celsius bankruptcy got on Mashinky’s nerves so much that he decided to ignore his lawyer’s advice and “broke his silence” in order to blame Dixon for “all of this fraud.”
Dixon said that Mashinsky “created a conspiracy theory” that Dixon has all of the creditor’s money and that he is being paid by Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) to try and “take down Celsius.”
Dixon encouraged his Twitter followers to casually go and sue Mashinsky, saying it would be a “valuable” asset to Celsius.
Future outlook
Dixon isn’t a fan of the Chapter 11 process, which he believes is “scammy” and just one “ginormous money grab” to steal client money.
While Dixon is a huge believer in Bitcoin, he doesn’t have any set price predictions. He thinks in “terms of four-year cycles” around the halvings, and right now, he said we’re “two years into the fourth cycle,” which is about surviving quantitative tightening.
He said that this will be a tough one because we’ve never proven that Bitcoin can survive when dollars aren’t being printed endlessly.
The last stage will be about surviving central bank digital currencies, which if successful, he believes Bitcoin will have “cemented itself as the store of value in the world.”
“This is going to change the world.”
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