The @MadBitcoins Twitter Archive — Cross-Era Overview

91,295 tweets · 2013-05-01 → 2026-03-18 · ~13 years on the platform

A complete read of the @MadBitcoins archive — 30,373 originals (not a reply, not a retweet), 22,197 replies, 38,725 retweets, 144,738 cumulative favorites, 33,818 cumulative retweets — describes one of the most durable single-handle careers in Bitcoin Twitter. Six distinct eras emerge from the data, each with its own format defaults, hashtag stack, and engagement physics. Below is the arc.

The Arc

The persona was complete before the audience was. The first tweet on May 1, 2013 already uses the format that would run for years: three to four headline slugs separated by "—", the "MadBitcoins!" exclamation, and a bit.ly to the YouTube show. There was no transitional period. The newscaster character is fully formed at birth.

Volume peaked in 2014 (16,092 tweets) and again in 2020 (15,620). The first peak is the daily-show grind establishing the brand. The second is pandemic-era social-media intensity colliding with the rise of live video and conference streaming. Neither year is the highest-engagement year — those are 2017–2018 — but they're the years the account worked hardest.

Engagement-per-tweet peaked in 2017–2018, during the SegWit pressure campaign, the Venezuela hyperinflation thesis, and the early Curio Cards moment. The era's median favorite count on originals is roughly an order of magnitude above the breakout era; top tweets routinely cleared 200+ favs and 50+ retweets, and the era max — the 2017 Venezuela tweet — hit 714/350.

The format quietly mutated from link-out to photo-led between 2017 and 2021. The 2013–2016 archive is dominated by bit.ly daily-show headers. The 2022–2026 archive is dominated by photo-and-opinion tweets that stand alone. The transition years are 2017–2018 (when both formats coexist and photos start winning) and 2019–2021 (when the conference-photo and CurioCards-screenshot formats become default).

Volume halved after 2021 and stayed there. 2022 was the first sub-3,500-tweet year since 2013. The pivot wasn't a decline in quality or engagement-per-tweet — those held — but a deliberate (or at least habitual) move toward fewer, more deliberate tweets. The account stopped being a megaphone and became a publication of record.

Engagement spikes and dips — and why

• Oct 2014 — OccupyHK breakout. First single tweet to clear 100 retweets. MadBitcoins becomes a recognizable name beyond Bitcoin Twitter.
• Aug 2017 — Venezuela / hyperinflation. The all-time top tweet. The thesis statement of why Bitcoin matters globally lands at exactly the right moment.
• Dec 2017 — SegWit pressure campaign. Coordinated "ATTENTION" tweets. The account demonstrates organizing capacity beyond commentary.
• Sep 2021 — Curio Cards Christie's auction. The account narrates a $1.2M auction in real-time, with the receipts to prove it had been calling the project since 2017.
• 2022 — quiet downshift. No single dip event; a structural change in posting cadence. The pandemic-era hyperactivity ends and isn't replaced.
• 2024–2025 — anniversary mode dominates. The most-engaged 2024/2025 originals are retrospectives, not current events. The audience now rewards memory.

Most-engaged topics across all time

Computed across the full archive:

1. Bitcoin price + cultural moments (Tesla buying, Jeopardy mention, Venezuela hyperinflation, ATM spotting) 2. Curio Cards milestones (Christie's, Sotheby's, Wikipedia, museum placements, the "older than CryptoPunks" campaign) 3. Live reporting from geopolitical or cultural flashpoints (Hong Kong 2014, Vegas, European conference tours) 4. Community-management and coordination tweets (SegWit pressure, "unifyBitcoin", "do not be incredibly rude to @rogerkver") 5. Personal-stake content that earned its place (Hank the dog, Nimoy tribute, A's fandom) 6. Calling out manipulators / "blockchain is not a truth machine" — skepticism that aged well 7. The "halvening fireworks" + "first day rule" + "MadBitcoinaire" running gags — recurring catchphrase content

Recurring series + concepts

• "Today in #Bitcoin (date)" daily-news header — runs from 2013 to present
• The Bitcoin Group (TBG) episode promos — 2016 onward
• MadTour 2019 — geographic series across Europe
• CurioCards milestone tweets — count of owners, auctions, exhibitions, Wikipedia citations
• Vegas weeklies — observational beat starting ~2017
• The "PSA / ATTENTION" tweet — coordination format, peaks 2017–2018
• A's / John Fisher / #selltheteam — sports anger genre, 2022 onward
• Anniversary memorials — Room 77, Dorian Satoshi, Hank, Curio Cards rediscovery
• The bearwhale callback — self-mythologizing genre, 2019 onward

Connection to the broader Mad Bitcoins / WCN / TBG / Curio story

The Twitter archive can be read as the connective tissue between four parallel projects:

• The MadBitcoins YouTube show (2013–present) — Twitter served as the show's distribution layer for years. Daily slugs are show-promo tweets.
• World Crypto Network (~2014–2020) — Hunt's co-host role at WCN shows up as TBG episode promos and WCN appearances. The most-engaged WCN-linked tweets are from 2017–2018.
• The Bitcoin Group (~2014–present) — TBG#XXX promos are a steady throughline. Engagement on these tweets correlates with which panelists appeared, more than with the topic.
• Curio Cards (2017–present) — From a quiet launch in May 2017 to the Christie's auction in 2021 and the Wikipedia / Moco Museum / NFT Yearbook placements of 2022–2024. The Twitter archive is the only continuous public record of Curio Cards' trajectory; no other outlet covered it longitudinally.

If the account ever went down — what to archive vs unearth

Archive first (highest cultural / historical value):

1. All 30,373 originals. Not just the high-engagement ones — the daily-show slugs from 2013–2016 are the only complete record of how a Bitcoin newscaster covered the early Mt. Gox / Hong Kong / halvening years day by day. 2. The Curio Cards thread of tweets (May 2017 → present) — this is the only continuous documentation of the first NFT art project's origin and rediscovery. 3. The SegWit pressure campaign tweets (Nov–Dec 2017) — a textbook case of social-media organizing in a technical community. 4. The Hong Kong OccupyHK reportage (2014) — citizen journalism that Bitcoin Twitter took on at a global-news scale. 5. The PSA / "do not be rude to @rogerkver" tweets (2017) — a record of how the BCH/BTC schism was being refereed in real time. 6. The Hank, Nimoy, Room 77, Dorian Satoshi memorial tweets — the human moments that earned the audience.

Unearth (low engagement, high historical interest):

1. The 2013 charity drives — Hoodie the Homeless, BitcoinNotBombs, the Philippines relief — modest engagement at the time, but the documentation of how early Bitcoin culture practiced charity. 2. The early altcoin coverage — Litecoin, Feathercoin, the AltCoin conference Hunt covered when nobody else did. 3. The "Who Wants to be a Bitcoinaire" pitch — a game show that never happened but documents the persona's range. 4. Long tail of conference TBG / WCN promos — useful as an episode index for the shows themselves. 5. The Lightning tinkering tweets (2021–2023) — early adoption documentation that the trade press skipped.

What surprised in the data

• The OccupyHK spike (2014) is the single biggest engagement event of the pre-2017 archive. The conventional narrative would put the top tweets later. They aren't.
• #bitcoin itself accounts for ~5,000 hashtag uses in the breakout era, dwarfing every other tag combined. The discipline was tighter than any subsequent era.
• 2020 was the second-highest-volume year ever, not 2017 or 2021. The pandemic was a content explosion that doesn't show up in the engagement story.
• The reply ratio jumps in 2019–2021 and stays high. The account became more conversational in those years and never fully returned to broadcast mode.
• The "Curio Cards older than CryptoPunks" campaign worked. A multi-year hashtag campaign that quietly achieved its goal (Wikipedia recognition, NFT yearbook inclusion) without ever going viral.
• No single political / partisan tweet is in the top-200 by engagement. MadBitcoins stayed editorially in its lane — a remarkable bit of discipline for a 13-year political-adjacent account.

The full archive is preserved in the brain.db corpus (source='twitter_archive', 91,295 rows) and rebuildable via the scripts in _data/. The site you're reading is a derived view; the source-of-truth is the SQLite database, which is in turn derived from the official Twitter export.

Highest-priority content to mirror elsewhere, in descending order of cultural / historical value:

1. All 30,373 originals. The daily-show slugs from 2013–2016 are the only complete record of how a Bitcoin newscaster covered the early Mt. Gox / Hong Kong / halvening years day by day.
2. The Curio Cards thread of tweets (May 2017 → present). The only continuous documentation of the first NFT art project's origin and rediscovery.
3. The SegWit pressure campaign tweets (Nov–Dec 2017). A textbook case of social-media organizing in a technical community.
4. The OccupyHK reportage (2014). Citizen journalism Bitcoin Twitter took on at global-news scale.
5. The "Do not be incredibly rude to @rogerkver" PSA series (2017). A record of how the BCH/BTC schism was being refereed.
6. The Hank, Nimoy, Room 77, Dorian Satoshi memorial tweets. The human moments that earned the audience.

Refresh procedure: re-run ~/Sites/1n2.org/twitter/_data/build_data.py (loads from brain.db) then build_site.py (regenerates HTML).