When Elon Musk tweeted something about cryptocurrency, the internet exploded.
“Wanna buy some bitcoin?”, the billionaire founder of Tesla and SpaceX on Tuesday wrote in a post to his 23 million Twitter followers, along with an illustration of an anime character in bitcoin-branded dress.
Wanna buy some Bitcoin? pic.twitter.com/9ZbBJ5fuVq
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 22, 2018
The bizarre tweet – part of Musk’s thread declaring his love for anime – has so far garnered more than 7,000 retweets and 19,000 likes, including engagement from big names in the cryptocurrency community.
“I will buy a Tesla if you accept crypto,” Zhao Changpeng, founder of Binance, the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange, commented in a retweet.
For US$1,000, would you buy an iPhone or HTC's latest crypto phone?
Musk later claimed that Twitter had temporarily locked his account fearing it was hacked. The episode came amid Twitter’s recent crackdown on scam accounts impersonating celebrities that claim to be giving away digital currencies like ether and posting misleading links.
To combat these fraudsters, cryptocurrency bigwigs such as ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin have changed their Twitter display names to include disclaimers like “Non-giver of Ether.”
Musk himself is no stranger to such scams, tweeting in July (with typos) that “I want to know who is running the Etherium scambots! Mad skillz.” This time, it turns out, the tweet promoting bitcoin came from the real Elon Musk.
So who is this anime character Musk tweeted about?
The character was created by a Japanese website called CryptoCurrencyGirls, which focuses on turning popular virtual currencies into anime characters while educating the public about investing in the space.
China's Bitcoin Girl tries to survive on cryptocurrency alone
Bitcoin, for example, is personified as a karaoke-loving pop icon living in the imaginary “Virtual Currency City”, while ethereum, wearing spectacles and a dressing gown, serves as a chairwoman of the library of the city’s school.
The site sells souvenirs bearing its brand and anime characters. An iPhone case with the silhouette of the bitcoin girl, for instance, sells for 2,600 yen, or about US$23.
Moe anthropomorphism, also known as gijinka in Japanese, is a popular trend in Japan’s anime, comic and games circle. It centers around the idea of turning non-human objects – anything from the iMac to the Starbucks logo – into human-like characters, often represented by females.
