Tech Entrepreneur offers Bitcoin bounty in campaign against Vox
In a surprising development, Tech Entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan has offered a bounty of $1000 in Bitcoins to the first person who can get Vox’s Recode website to retract a story on COVID 19. As per the details, the story was published in February, and it dealt with the overreaction of Silicon Valley to the COVID 19 situation. The Tech entrepreneur mainly targeted Kara Swisher, who is the Editor and Co-Founder of Recode. He believes that with such an announcement, he will surely get the result as expected.
$1000 bounty in Bitcoins
Srinivasan said in his tweets that he will offer $ 1000, which is equivalent to 0.11 BTC to any person who is able to get a reply that is time-stamped from Recode agreeing to make corrections to the article. He also mentioned that the correction needs to be published in order to get the bounty. This tweet has drawn the attention of many tech experts and induced them to have the bounty in their wallet. Some people also reacted as a surprise in response to the tweets made by Srinivasan. However, the experts in this field look it from a different viewpoint.
Balaji Srinivasan tweets on Bitcoin bounty offer
He mentioned that Kara Swisher has not yet run a formal retraction of the article that contained false reports about the reaction of silicon valley to the COVID 19 situation. He alleged that the business model of Recode does not incentivize truth, and it has now become the responsibility of the public to do it. He clearly said that any person who can get Recode to correct the record will get a $ 1000 bounty. He even gave the link of the article in his tweets. His announcement is loud and clear and hence also got a good response on social media. However, yet it is not confirmed if any tech expert has contacted him and if there is any further development in this direction.
The Recode article about COVID 19
The story about COVID 19 was first published in February, and Srinivasan soon posted his disagreement on Twitter. He alleged that the article omitted many contexts and contained false statements. The article had said that the risk of virus transmission in public places was low, which later turned out to be false. In the same way, the article also mentioned that the CDC did not recommend avoiding handshakes, and this was later condemned by many people as CDC was always in favor of social distancing norms.
The writer also went on to make fun of other people who take too many precautions about avoiding meeting people during this situation. However, at that point, there were less than 100 cases in the United States, and the understanding about this disease was very less. Not much information about the transmission and other things was available from China, and the errors in the article may be due to those reasons.
Reactions over Bitcoin bounty
The reactions to this bounty in Bitcoins were mixed. Many people felt that Srinivasan went overboard in offering a bounty on journalists, and he should not have done so on a public platform. A tech entrepreneur doing this will set the wrong precedents for other people in the future, and many people may resort to using this method for harassing people. However, Srinivasan also got many supporters who mentioned that the media needs to be more responsible in reporting issues about COVID 19 pandemic. However, the crypto world got into big-time news with such a bounty offer coming in Bitcoins mode. This may set a trend for many such offers from various people across the globe.