Pivot + Decline — 2022–2024

8,202 tweets · 2,191 originals · The quieter, stranger years

Volume drops by more than two-thirds from the 2019–2021 peak. 2022 lands at 3,360 tweets, 2023 at 2,237, 2024 at 2,605 — together less than one strong year from the breakout era. Engagement-per-tweet stays decent, but the floor and the ceiling both lower. This is the era where MadBitcoins becomes less of a megaphone and more of a journal.

What he was talking about

• Curio Cards as a historical project, not a current one. The dominant theme of 2022–2023. Wikipedia gets a CurioCards article (Feb 2022, 48/14). The "older than CryptoPunks" campaign runs for years (Apr 2024, 60/11). The Moco Museum Barcelona placement alongside Beeple, Banksy, Warhol (Jul 2023, 41/5). Curio Cards is now an art-history asset; Hunt is the custodian, not the promoter.
• The Oakland A's. A genuinely new content vertical. "Let's go A's! @LastDiveBar" tweets become a regular fixture. The "John Fisher is a disgrace #selltheteam #sell #FJF" tweet (Sep 2024, 55/6) is fan-anger as a recurring genre. This is the most non-Bitcoin content the account has ever had as a stable thread.
• Quieter Bitcoin reporting. Interviews continue ("@ElectrumWallet creator Thomas Voegtlin", Aug 2023, 34/8). Conference visits continue ("Hardly any real #bitcoiners here, but I did find @TechBalt", Apr 2022). But the urgency is gone — these read as "I'm still here, doing this" notes rather than breakouts.
• Memorial / nostalgic mode. "Remembering May 25, 2016... When @MadBitcoins met Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto" (May 2023, 42/5). The account is now old enough that it spends real energy on anniversaries.
• Bitterness, briefly visible. "Imagine a world where a project creates a #bitcoin video everyday for a decade and has never been featured in @CoinDesk @Cointelegraph or @BMagazine" (May 2023, 57/16). A rare crack in the persona — a working journalist who built a vertical from scratch noticing he's not credited by the trade press.
• #Lightning tinkering. "I bought these glasses from @arcbtc's incredible offline #lightning #bitcoin machine!" (Apr 2022, 121/6). The Lightning Network as a tactile, in-person thing.

What landed

Photo-led tweets continue to outperform link-out tweets, and the gap widens. The era's top originals all have an image or video. Personal-stake tweets (the A's, the CurioCards-vs-CryptoPunks rivalry) land harder than reportage tweets, which is the inverse of earlier eras.

What flopped

Long retrospective threads about Bitcoin history that don't tie back to a personal milestone underperformed badly. Pure news-summary tweets without a personal angle largely vanished — and the few that survive have noticeably lower engagement than they would have in 2017–2018.

Voice characteristics

Markedly more elliptical. Tweets are shorter on average, lean on photographs, and assume the reader already knows the context. "Monero in Venice" (Jul 2023, 55/2) is a complete tweet. The MadBitcoins newscaster is mostly retired; what's left is Hunt-as-curator, archivist, sports fan, museum-noter.

The hashtag stack tightens around a smaller core: #bitcoin (924 in the era), #live (94), #curiocards (89), #nft (76), #bitcoin22 (43 — the Miami conference). Mentions concentrate on people Hunt has known for years — @LastDiveBar, @arcbtc, @MyCurioCards.

A new tonal register emerges: dry institutional pride. "Update: Curio Cards are now featured on the Wikipedia entry for 'Non-Fungible Token'. Epic!" (Apr 2024, 39/7). This is the voice of someone who has stopped trying to convince anyone and is just keeping records.

Series + recurring concepts

• Curio Cards older than CryptoPunks — multi-year campaign that quietly succeeds
• A's / #selltheteam / John Fisher — running sports-anger thread
• Museum placements and Wikipedia citations — pride-in-receipts genre
• Conference check-ins — "I was there" minimalism
• Anniversary memorials — Dorian Satoshi, Room 77, etc.

Why the era matters

This is when the account becomes recognizably late-stage. The structural shift away from daily-show link-outs (which dominated 2013–2018) toward photo-led personal observation (which dominates 2022–2024) is the most important format change in the entire archive. It's also the era where it becomes clear MadBitcoins isn't going anywhere — declining volume isn't the same as fading away. The account is now a 10+ year reference, and Hunt knows it.

Flagship tweets

• 1805397420689473931 (2024-06-25) — "Let's go A's! @LastDiveBar" (193/11)
• 1512527743715627010 (2022-04-08) — Lightning glasses
• 1784296738616119772 (2024-04-27) — @nft_yearbook inclusion
• 1487466235191767000 range (2022-01-29) — CurioCards breaks 5,000 owners
• 1661740594614652930 (2023-05-25) — Remembering Dorian Satoshi meeting
• 1685565197912600577 (2023-07-30) — "Monero in Venice"