In brief
- A popular subreddit for cryptocurrencies reaches 1 million subscribers.
- It's launching a competition to celebrate.
- r/Bitcoin still occupies the top spot for crypto.
The prime subreddit for cryptocurrency memes, guerrilla reporting and price speculation, r/CryptoCurrency, today surpassed 1 million subscribers, making it the 299th most popular subreddit on the 14-year-old social network site.
To celebrate the landmark occasion—a once-in-a-lifetime event, so long as its 1 million subscribers don’t abandon it—r/CryptoCurrency is giving away close to 1.5 million satoshis, or…$107. To be eligible for the grand prize, subscribers must leave by comment a base10 number between 0 and 65535.
The competition will run until the end of April 22, whereupon comments will be locked and the winner randomly selected by Bitcoin miners. Specifically, the moderators will take the hash of Bitcoin block number 627300, read the last four characters of that hash, and convert them back to a base10 number. The comment with the closest number will win the top price of around $73, with two runners-up taking home the rest.
The 1 million mark lags behind its sister subreddit, r/Bitcoin, which has 1.375 million readers and is the 204th most subscribed to subreddit on the site. But it’s twice as many as r/Ethereum’s 457,950 readers, and four times as many as r/Ripple, which trails behind with 212,000 readers. But r/Bitcoin had the head start: it was created 9 years ago, while r/CryptoCurrency was created 7 years ago.
Follow the money
To capture Reddit’s closest analog to institutional investors, the folk at r/wallstreetbets, who describe themselves as “like 4chan found a Bloomberg Terminal,” r/CryptoCurrency must attract 118,566 more subscribers.
r/CryptoCurrency must work even harder to reach the real big leagues: r/worldnews has 23.8 million subscribers, and r/gaming has 25.8 million. The top spot is occupied by r/announcements—which users are subscribed to upon opening up new accounts—with 55.7 million subscribers. But who said this was going to be easy?