Ben “BitBoy” Armstrong vs “Atozy” – an ugly little spat in a pretty big corner of the Crypto YouTube sphere – appears to be done and dusted.

Armstrong, founder of BitBoy Crypto – the second-biggest crypto-focused YouTube account with more than 1.44 million subscribers (Coin Bureau has 2.09m) – is dropping a defamation suit he’d officially filed against content creator Erling Mengshoel Jr., aka Atozy.

It all began with a video from Atozy dated November 12, 2021, titled “This YouTuber Scams His Fans”. In it, Atozy labels BitBoy a “shady dirtbag who milks his audience for a quick buck, rather than giving them genuine advice”.

And that’s just the tip of the particularly spiky, 11-minute-long iceberg. It also alleged that BitBoy was promoting dodgy, “scam” cryptos to his audience, such as PAMP coin, for his own gain.

At the time of writing, it’s still up on YouTube and has close to 190,000 views, although whether or not Atozy decides to remove it or edit it the way BitBoy would like, remains to be seen.

 

‘Hate me all you want’…

Armstrong, who has a loyal army of supporters but is also clearly somewhat of a polarising figure in the world of social-media-based crypto content, filed the lawsuit on August 12.

Through it, he was seeking US$75,000 in damages. And he’s been firing out a barrage of combative-sounding Tweets ever since. Like this one:

And chest-beating ones like this, too:

Anyway, here’s where things are at now. BitBoy/Armstrong has now shelved the complaint after Mengshoel Jr managed to raise more than US$200,000 for his defence – clearly a pleasant shock for the latter.

Here’s Atozy/Mengshoel Jr before he received that funding help, explaining his view of the lawsuit and asking for support…

One donation to the Atozy defence, to the tune of US$100,000, came from well-known Crypto Twitter identity “Cobie”, of UpOnly podcast fame. In fact, Cobie has also highlighted at least one BitBoy video in the past in not the most flattering light. But we’ll leave that alone.

In one of his regular livestreams, below, Armstrong explained that his aim for the lawsuit was for Mengshoel Jr. to take down the video, making it clear that it was never his preference for all this to actually reach court proceedings.

In reference to the coin PAMP, which rug pulled about four months after BitBoy Crypto made a video about it, he said that the project changed the smart contract he and his team of researchers initially reviewed. (And yes, Armstrong has a team of researchers, as well as producers, editors, the works.)

“I care about my community… I never want to do wrong by my fans,” said Armstrong, making it clear that his channel no longer does sponsored videos, partly to avoid the sorts of accusations that he feels have unfairly come his way.

He also said that Atozy has effectively “won” now the decision has been made to pull the lawsuit.

“Atozy, you won. You’re the winner here. I’m the loser,” Armstrong conceded.

Meanwhile, Atozy has tweeted inferring that he won’t be fully satisfied until the lawsuit is dismissed “with prejudice”, which would prevent BitBoy from refiling should he choose to do so, which, to be fair, seems unlikely.

Earlier, David Schwartz, the CTO at Ripple Labs, creator of XRP, weighed in on this very public crypto stoush. (BitBoy, by the way, is an avid supporter of XRP judging by some of his videos this year and in late 2021.) Responding to one of Armstrong’s tweets (further above), Schwartz wrote:

Now the dust has settled, Schwartz added:

 

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