Former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, who is the presumptive Democratic nominee for the 2020 U.S. presidential election in November, said on Thursday (July 16) that he doesn’t own any Bitcoin.
Why would Biden feel the need to make such a declaration?
Well, that’s because on Wednesday a group of hackers (or perhaps one hacker) used illegally obtained credentials for some of Twitter’s internal support systems to take over (and sends tweets from) 45 verified Twitter accounts as part of a Bitcoin phishing scam that promised people that if they sent some bitcoin to a specific Bitcoin address/account, they would get back double that amount back.
As of now, we know that they accessed tools only available to our internal support teams to target 130 Twitter accounts. For 45 of those accounts, the attackers were able to initiate a password reset, login to the account, and send Tweets.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 18, 2020
One of those 45 compromised Twitter accounts belonged to Biden:
Breaking: Joe Biden’s twitter account has been hacked, promoting a bitcoin scam. pic.twitter.com/g1qA62MnI1
— PM Breaking News (@PMBreakingNews) July 15, 2020
This promoted Biden to send out a tweet the following day to make it clear to his followers he neither owns any Bitcoin nor would he ever ask for donations in Bitcoin:
I don’t have Bitcoin, and I’ll never ask you to send me any.
But if you want to chip in to help make Donald Trump a one-term President, you can do that here: https://t.co/8XtBjuU5fX
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) July 16, 2020
As you can see in the above tweet, he then provided a link to the donation page on his website where U.S. citizens or lawfully admitted permanent residents can make USD donations to his presidential campaign.
Gabor Gurbacs, digital asset strategist/director at VanEck/MVIS, used this opportunity to promote Bitcoin:
Hey @JoeBiden. If you want to study up on #Bitcoin, my research is a good place to start. https://t.co/bJDQoqPr9o https://t.co/keC3iOExJP
— Gabor Gurbacs (@gaborgurbacs) July 16, 2020
As for President Donald Trump, although thankfully his Twitter account did not get hacked, he did express how feels about Bitcoin (and cryptocurrencies in general) in particular via a tweet he sent last July:
I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air. Unregulated Crypto Assets can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity….
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 12, 2019
As for other U.S. presidential candidates, according to Bitcoin.com, “the first ever presidential candidate to accept Bitcoin donations was Rand Paul, back in 2015.”
For the 2020 U.S. presidential race, the most pro-crypto candidate was entrepreneur Andrew Yang, who dropped out in February. Last July, according to a report by Coindesk, a group of Yang’s supports “launched a crypto-friendly super PAC” that used a Bitcoin payment processor called OpenNode (backed by Tim Draper) to accept BTC payments from Lightning wallets.
Bitcoin.com’s report states that fellow Democratic candidate Tulsi Gabbard, who dropped out of the race in March, “also appears to be invested, quite literally, listed on an official Financial Disclosure Report as having purchased Ethereum and Litecoin in 2017.”
