Bitcoin may have just undergone the most significant crash in its history gaining and then losing over 300 US dollars in price, but while the dust may have settled, the action has not. You can always find company at BTC-E, particularly in its chat room, dubbed the “Trollbox,” because one can’t help but read it, and it filled with obnoxiousness prompting traders to buy, sell, and hold various crypto-currencies (or crypto for short).

What is BTC-E?

BTC-E is a trading platform where crypto-currency enthusiasts (hereafter the ugly but useful: Bitcoiners), wax positional about matters like the future price of Bitcoin, whether or not Litecoin, Bitcoin’s lead alternative, is a “scamcoin,” or when (not if) Bitcoin will match the price of an ounce of gold – and the chat room they do it in is called the Trollbox.

Since the average number of chatting Bitcoiners hovers around 9,000, it remains unclear whether or not Bitcoiners are really talkative or there’s just tons of them.

Take Me to the Trollbox

The Trollbox is home to many discussions regarding cryptocurrency. Many users claim it controls prices because their psychology, according to them, is inescapably brutalized by the whims of constant chatting. One forum user said:

I will not use btc-e until they get rid of that noobbox, spambox, er chatbox, they have. I don’t care it they move the chatbox to btc/ltc/chat. Get it off every f*cking page! I’m sick of it and I know I’m not the only one. I’ll use another exchange until they do. It’s nothing but trolls and it’s not professional. Get rid of it or lose serious investors.

That much may be true, and with the growing price of Litecoin, BTC’s brother with 84 million possible coins (BTC only has 21 million), one can only wonder if Litecoin’s growth is solely attributable to the trolls and hawkers of the Trollbox.

What Is a Troll?

UrbanDictionary.com defines it as:

One who posts a deliberately provocative message to a newsgroup or message board with the intention of causing maximum disruption and argument

In this case, however, the name of the game is telling people to buy, sell, or hold – all for the purposes of getting the troll’s choice in cryptocurrency a price hike (or decline, if they’re sitting on fiat).

Now, if you’re wondering about just how far this Bitcoin thing has come, besides T-shirts and a market cap of 8,000,000, the Trollbox even has memes. some beyond terrible like the following T-shirt:



And for no known reason, Bitcoiners in the Trollbox refer to Litecoin as “Chikun,” which is what makes this shirt promoting Bitcoin downright baffling:

The Trollbox is surprisingly lacking homophobia compared to say, Xbox Live, (the f slur count making for only a couple hundred in 3 months) –but of course, Trollbox is laden with misogyny (well, some feel b*tch is inherently misogynistic) because Trollbox might be filled with people playing with money, but it’s still the awful internet.