Image: AP

This morning we learned an important new detail about the troubled on-again, off-again beau of Kourtney Kardashian. That’s right, people: Scott Disick loves Bitcoin.



This gives Disick the ignominious distinction of being the first Keeping Up with the Kardashians regular to weigh in on cryptocurrencies on Twitter—and yes, we checked. Two of the five cryptocoin messages he tweeted out today linked to Coinbase.com, a digital wallet and exchange for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin. We reached out to Coinbase to see if Disick is acting as a paid spokesperson—as our colleagues at Jezebel learned, Disick regularly leverages his minor internet celebrity status to score between $15,000 and $20,000 per Instagram post, a very easy job he’s still been known to fuck up!


Is Disick a shill or a true believer in our decentralized future? Despite sporting a Bitcoin t-shit in his new avatar, one (rude-looking!) tweet of the bunch was especially convincing that he’s thoroughly on board, maybe.


As someone who has systematically avoided or ignored all Kardashian-related programming other than The People vs. OJ Simpson, I’ll be the first to admit I’m working with about half the answers to the obvious question: What is all this shit? But here’s the highly simplified version.



Currently Bitcoin, which is the most valuable cryptocoin by a huge margin, is staring down two potential “hardforks”—splits that represent big changes to how the protocol works.


One of those forks is SegWit2x (short for “segregated witness”), a solution to the speed and number of transactions Bitcoin can handle. As things stand currently, a big chunk of each Bitcoin block is relegated to a list of verification signatures, and, without getting too technical, the space these signatures take up is causing massive slowdown for transactions. SegWit2x shuffles around where the signatures live—a change which has widespread adoption across the Bitcoin community. The majority of Bitcoin nodes will flip to SegWit2x at block 494,784, which is projected to take place sometime in mid-November.

If the “no2x” in his handle or #no2x hashtag didn’t give it away, Disick—who has previously expressed no opinion on cryptocoins to the best of our knowledge—falls in the 5 percent of enthusiasts who believe SegWit is too drastic of a departure from the way Bitcoin was described in the original Satoshi Nakamoto whitepaper. As a further hint, Disick tagged Dr. Craig Wright, the man some believe to be the “real” Satoshi.


It’s unclear if the “Bitcoin” has Disick declared his love for refers to the main currency, the upcoming Bitcoin Gold fork (which bills itself as an attempt to re-democratize the process of mining coins), or the previously-forked Bitcoin Cash (currently worth about $350 per coin compared to its parent’s $5,600).

In any case, the comparison between whatever version of Bitcoin Disick is gung ho about and Caitlyn Jenner’s transition is largely lost on me. Polling some coworkers more versed in the Kardashiaverse, Disick’s dig appears to suggest SegWit is “selling out” Bitcoin in some way. Who knows. The tweet requires a better than average understanding of Kardashian drama and cryptocurrency jargon, which winnows the potential audience of this snide remark down to probably three people, Disick included. Are you one of the other two? Give us us your guesses below.


Update 3:07pm: Asked for more information on the current Kardashian context, Jezebel staffers suggested that a Gizmodo editor was “overthinking it” and “it seems like [Disick is] just being transphobic.”