This Reddit moderator wiped out every conversation about a Bitcoin fork and accidentally created a $74 BILLION rival chain

His handle was theymos, an anonymous mod who controlled the three biggest Bitcoin discussion forums in the world from one account, r/Bitcoin, BitcoinTalk and the Bitcoin Wikipedia
BitcoinTalk wasn't just any forum, Satoshi Nakamoto started it in 2009 and theymos became an admin in 2011, effectively taking over once Satoshi disappeared
By 2015 Bitcoin had a real problem, blocks were filling up and fees were rising
One side of the community wanted to fork Bitcoin and make the blocks bigger so transactions stayed cheap, the other side wanted to keep blocks small and build solutions like Lightning Network on top
The two sides could not coexist
On August 15, 2015, former Bitcoin developer Mike Hearn released BitcoinXT, the first real attempt to hard fork Bitcoin to bigger blocks
To activate, it needed support from 75% of miners
One day later, theymos went nuclear
Any discussion of BitcoinXT on r/Bitcoin got reclassified as "off topic altcoin discussion" and deleted on sight
Then he posted, "If 90% of /r/Bitcoin users find these policies to be intolerable, then I want these 90% of /r/Bitcoin users to leave. Without some real argument, you're not going to convince anyone with any brains. You're just wasting your time and ours"
The same rule got enforced on BitcoinTalk and the Bitcoin Wikipedia
Every channel where Bitcoin holders went to learn about XT, the conversation was deleted and without public discussion, BitcoinXT couldn't build support
It needed 75% of the miners, only achieved 12% and then died
Three days into the censorship, one of theymos's own mods called jratcliff63367 wrote a post titled "Confessions of an /r/bitcoin moderator" admitting it was real
Theymos removed him within 10 days
A second mod called hardleft121, a beloved community member who tipped Bitcoin to random users, got removed a week later for "inactivity"
Roger Ver, also known as Bitcoin Jesus, got banned from Reddit for publicly naming theymos
He even flew to Reddit HQ in San Francisco, met with CEO Steve Huffman in person and got his account restored a few days later
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong went on stage with Huffman in 2016 and said out loud, "His username is theymos. If you want to ban him" but Reddit didn't ban him
In January 2016, Mike Hearn quit Bitcoin entirely
He wrote a long essay declaring Bitcoin a failed experiment, sold every single coin he owned and walked away
Causing the price to drop 14% the same day
The big block side realized they would never win on r/Bitcoin, so they moved to a new subreddit called r/btc and thousands of users followed them out
Then they tried two more soft forks, Bitcoin Classic and Bitcoin Unlimited
Both got the same treatment from theymos and both failed
By 2017 they gave up trying to change Bitcoin itself
On August 1, 2017, almost exactly two years after theymos changed the rules, they did what they couldn't do from inside the network
They hard forked Bitcoin onto a new chain called Bitcoin Cash, with bigger blocks built in from day one
By December 2017, Bitcoin Cash hit $4,355 a coin and a peak market cap of $74 billion
A year later BCH split itself again into BCH and BSV in a hash war that crashed all of crypto by 50%
Roger Ver was arrested in 2024 on tax evasion charges tied to his Bitcoin sales
Two years of mass deletes on Reddit spawned a $74 billion fork, a second fork, a market crash and the criminal indictment of one of Bitcoin's earliest evangelists
Theymos is still an admin of r/Bitcoin and BitcoinTalk today