Genesis Mining, one of the largest cloud mining companies in the world, seems to be running a new #BitcoinAwareness campaign, this time involving installing huge billboards outside Warren Buffet’s office to make fun of Buffet’s silly and much-publicized recent comments on Bitcoin.
On 5 May 2018, at Berkshire Hathaway’s 2018 annual shareholder’s conference said in an interview with CNBC that Bitcoin is “probably rat poison squared.” Interestingly, on the same day, he admitted that he had been wrong about not investing in Google and Amazon:
“I made the wrong decisions on Google and Amazon… We've looked at it. I made the mistake in not being able to come to a conclusion where I really felt that at the present prices that the prospects were far better than the prices indicated.”
Dr. Marco Krohn, co-founder of Genesis Mining, claimed yesterday on Twitter that billboards had been installed outside Buffet’s office that remind Buffet of being wrong about Google/Amazon and ask the trollish question “Maybe you’re wrong about Bitcoin?”:
Some new billboards outside of Warren Buffetts office! 🙂
#GenesisMining #Bitcoin #BitcoinAwareness pic.twitter.com/MxuKLwRS8L— Marco Krohn (@mkrohn5) May 16, 2018
Genesis Mining started its Bitcoin advocacy efforts started on 27 May 2015 because it felt that Bitcoin’s coverage on mainstream media usually came with quite a negative bias. So, they decided to start a campaign called #ExploreBitcoin that had the mission of raising the U.S. public’s awareness of Bitcoin. Here are photos from two of their taxi ads:
Then in January 2016, they decided to troll that Bitcoin critic Jamie Dimon, the chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, who made the following comments in October 2014 while speaking at a panel at the annual meeting of the Institute of International Finance:
“[Bitcoin developers] are going to try and eat our lunch and that’s fine… That’s called competition, and we’ll be competing.”
So, what they did on the 2nd day of the 2016 North American Bitcoin Conference (TNABC) in Miami, Florida was to have the following mobile billboard drive around the conference center:
However, they reserved their best trolling for this month’s Consensus 2018 blockchain conference in New York City. They called this campaign #BankersAgainstBitcoin. What they did was to hire around 100 actors to pretend to be “protestors”; these protestors were supposed to be bankers and other financial services people who would lose their jobs if the companies they worked for failed to warm up to Bitcoin. According to Mashable, one of the chants was “hey hey, ho ho, Bitcoin has got to go.” You can find a short video of the protesters in action on Genesis Mining’s YouTube channel.
On the protest organizers’ website, CEO of Genesis Mining, Marco Streng wrote:
“As you can probably tell, this protest is meant to be a joke.
But this joke today is going to be the reality in the very near future.
This protest is representative of what will happen to those industries and companies that fail to understand times have changed.
Legacy industries that have gone unchallenged for decades will soon begin to see their monopoly slip away.
The consumer abuse that’s been possible due to a lack of competition is over. The biggest competitor big banks have ever faced has arrived and it’s not a company or organization, it’s a decentralized technology.
It will soon no longer be possible to charge the poorest people in the world exorbitant fees to send money back home to support their families.
Industries like the lucrative $15 billion overdraft industry that enrich banks will soon disappear.
And all the middlemen who’ve built business models simply from being in the middle – will see their control slowly slip away.
These are just a few of the hundreds – if not thousands of examples of the industries blockchain technology will disrupt.”
In their blog post on 14 May 2018, Genesis Mining made it clear that they have no intention of quitting these bitcoin awareness campaigns and that many more would be launched throughout the remainder of the year. And as we see can from their latest campaign to troll Buffet, they seem to be keeping true to their word.
