Seems like it was archived here:

Forbes

BBC Bitcoin Coverage Raises Concern Over Its Journalism And Trust

The BBC

Which sites are taking it down?

The Forbes website article quote-posted is also 404.

I find the article a bit alarmist and pedantic. I don't think it would convince anyone outside our filter bubble, and might even backfire. Most BBC readers wouldn't understand the distinction between transaction and payment. Using FOIA seems complete overkill. I don't know why Forbes took it down, that's bad journalistic practice: they can put a notice at the top if they feel there's a serious issue with it. I very much doubt there's anything to it, e.g. I don't think the BBC threatened to sue them. But who knows. That said, De Vries articles do need debunking, but that should focus on the bigger picture. E.g 1. the fact that it's utterly ridiculous to use water consumption as a metric without any consideration of the local context. Is the miner draining an aquifer that millions of people depend on for drinking water? Or using a giant river? 2. the fact that both "per transaction" and "per payment" are dubious metrics when applied to mining. The energy and water are used to secure the network, that includes but also value at rest. The water use per transaction can be reduced to a single molecule by a bunch of lightning nodes running on AWS making trillions of transactions in a circle.

* that includes transactions but also value at rest

A better target for a FOIA request imo would be the Dutch Central Bank. I would be curious to know it they are involved with marketing Alex's material to the various media outlets that published it. In other words, I'm not at all worried about a media conspiracy to attack Bitcoin, but I think a central bank coordinated smear campaign is at least plausible. But he might just be good at marketing.

Hope it gets back up, until then the Web Archive saves the day! 🟠

I don't get why the BBC doesn't want to give out information about the process around the article in question? Why be so secretive about it? As for the article, it seems like it was more about calling out the BBC than their flawed use of metrics.

Presumably that has nothing to do with this particular article, which in all likeliness was written by some intern and not the big deal we think it is. Whatever their general reasons are to resist FOIA requests, they probably just apply those across the board in order to not set precedent. I don't know enough about UK law and journalistic process to know why they resist it, but in the general case I could imagine it's related to protecting sources. If you're handing over a pile of docs in a hurry and forget to black out a single cc, you could get a source compromised.