Bitcoin posts on X can pay even when Bitcoin doesn’t

You don't have to own Bitcoin to make money from people getting excited about it. On X, just posting about it can be a business in itself, and the company now wants £207,384 back from people it alleges took that business a bit too far.

In its Sept. 17 lawsuit, X accuses Vivek Kumar Sen, Zamyang Sherpa, and unidentified operators of running a coordinated account network that manipulated engagement to collect creator payments.

If £207,000 seems like very little money for a company the size of X, that's because it absolutely is. So why is a company that was bought for $44 billion suing a couple of guys for literally pennies?

The stakes here are the principles behind its (often controversial) payment program and the potential cost of allowing other users to copy the (alleged) behavior. Paying creators gives people a reason to publish, but if manufactured popularity pays too, the company then risks funding the very activity it wants to remove from people's feeds.

Bitcoin can fall while the posts keep paying

The basic arrangement is straightforward: X pays eligible creators for attracting an audience, with views from paying subscribers contributing to earnings. The account essentially gets paid for the attention it gets, more or less regardless of what it or its audience says or does.