Uber Argentina Is Not Accepting Bitcoin And Never Directly Did — Pompliano’s Tweet Is All Pomp & No Fact
Disclaimer: I’m not a journalist or a professional writer just a skeptic of sloppy journalism, research and deceitful crypto news.
Let’s begin — Crypto Twitterati re-earthed this article from 2016:
The purposefully ‘bullish’ article titled ‘Uber Switches to Bitcoin in Argentina After Govt Blocks Uber Credit Cards’ (published by Cointelegraph) was embellished and pandering to Bitcoin fans without delving into the facts back in 2016.
And found itself re-shared in 2018 by Anthony Pompliano with the following words:
(Pompliano is an outspoken cryptocurrency proponent, Founder & Partner at Morgan Creek Digital and a writer whom analyzes crypto news for institutional investors via a daily newsletter with a Twitter platform of 159K followers)
The Tweet caused a flurry of social media likes, responses, shares, YouTube videos from Crypto Fans praising adoption but more worryingly the publication of a number of equally un-researched articles further propagating a non-factual misconception like this article — which even caught the CEO of Binance (with a Twitter fanbase podium boasting 220K followers) commenting ‘Nice!’ on Pompliano’s tweet, which was later deleted but at the onset added more light to something which should never have seen the light of day to begin with.
As shown by several respondents:
Following the tweet and being skeptical of crypto news/social media I asked a reliable source — the General Manager of Uber Argentina about their reported use of Bitcoin and how that adoption has evolved in those 2 years, something which I would think professional writers and analysts would check or at least be curious about…
The following response was far from what Pompliano and publications like Cointelegraph had pandered to cryptocurrency adopters:
^Payments were processed in USD and Uber does not accept Bitcoin anywhere — hate it or love it that’s the truth.
Crypto publications and crypto ‘influencers’ (e.g. IMO anyone with a huge social media podium in excess of 100K followers) should be following the credo of every trader or hodler — Do Your Own Research or at least don’t spin the information into non-factual bullish or bearish sentiments to influence the market. The crypto market with it’s comparatively low liquidity is open to market swings based on sentiment as we have seen in the now comically legendary ‘Korea FUD’ news releases which have later been debunked as fake & purposefully manipulative news, but only after causing significant PR damage and triggering large sell offs. Rarely issuing retractions or publicly apologizing for sloppy or criminally negligent reporting.
Even recently — mainstream media did the rounds with an article — shared by CNBC and sourced from Business Insider: erroneously claiming that:
‘Goldman Sachs is ditching near-term plans to open a bitcoin trading desk’ this reportedly triggered a huge sell off which plummeted BTC price from 7.4K USD to 6.4K USD in 45 minutes and was later debunked:
“I never thought I would hear myself use this term but I really have to describe that news as Fake news.” Goldman Sachs CFO Martin Chavez said on stage at the TechCrunch Disrupt Conference in San Francisco.
As you can see — in the two links above, there was no retraction or update owning up to the publishing of criminally incorrect information even after a statement from the CFO. So for all the casual reader knows: this is fact and will continue to be seen by anyone else googling ‘Bitcoin’ & ‘Goldman Sachs’.
So to all the news sources and ‘influencers’ with a large outreach I urge you to do your due diligence, be responsible, if you are proven wrong then have the decency to retract or apologize for the inaccuracy, you owe it to the community that supports you. To the traders and hodlers you owe it to yourselves to do your own research and not be easily influenced by the ‘Coin-telling-lies-a-grams’ publications or the Anthony ‘Non-factual-ianos’ of this space.
-Andy. K.