Elon Musk, Twitter, Dogecoin, Bluesky, and the Decentralized Race for Social Media – Decipher

Elon did. Crypto Twitter’s jolly jester king – whose tweets about Dogecoin have repeatedly moved the price, whose July 2018 “pedo guy” tweet about a British diver landed him in court for defamation (he won) , whose August 2018 “funding secured” tweet led to SEC securities fraud charges ($20 million fine) – now owns the company.

When this story started six months (!) ago with Musk’s original $44 billion bid, I wrote, “Musk probably won’t be able to buy Twitter. But crypto advocates should cheer it on if they want to see Twitter truly embrace crypto tools. .” I was wrong on the first account; the second is still unanswered, but heats up fast.

Musk initially said, both publicly and in private text messages (since leaked), that he intended to chain Twitter and make it open source, accept Dogecoin for payments for Twitter services and tackle crypto spam bots.

But then, in texts with a representative of FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, Musk wrote, “Blockchain Twitter is not possible. Bandwidth and latency requirements cannot be supported by a peer to peer network unless those “peers” are absolutely gigantic. , thus defeating the purpose of a decentralized network.”

And even! Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, backed Musk’s final $500 million purchase and is “creating an internal team to focus on ways blockchain and crypto could benefit Twitter” , the company said. Decrypt Friday. Binance thinks it has Musk’s ear.

Regardless of your opinion of Musk, anyone who believes in the future viability of crypto and blockchain solutions and would like to see more mainstream adoption should be excited to see what happens next.

Twitter users who loudly protest its ownership and threaten to leave usually won’t leave. The irony is that if they do, many of their other options now also have a crypto connection.

Facebook is so committed to the metaverse that it renamed its company Meta, and even after its Reality Labs metaverse division lost $3.6 billion in the third quarter, sending the stock down more than 25%, it needs to double down. strategy. It’s unclear to what extent Meta’s metaverse will use crypto and blockchain, but remember that the company has tried to create its own cryptocurrency once before.

Jack Dorsey, clearly a Musk confidant who could advise him on what to do on Twitter, left Twitter to focus on Block, formerly Square, which, like Facebook, was so determined to publicly prove its commitment to a new field of technology which has changed its name. But Dorsey’s separate “decentralized social media” effort, Bluesky – born inside Twitter and now independent – just launched a website for its AT protocol (it stands for Authenticated Transport) and opened the list of waiting for its Bluesky app, which the team defines as a “browser” to access the AT protocol.

Bluesky is continuing Dorsey’s vision of putting Twitter on a protocol, but don’t call it blockchain (or Web3, since Dorsey doesn’t believe in it).

Even Kanye West is in the mix with Parler, the right-wing social media app he buys. Parler launched an NFT marketplace in March called DeepRedSky which debuted with a Trump NFT collection. Kanye himself has raved about Bitcoin and was recently spotted wearing a Satoshi Nakamoto cap.

Discord has moved away from crypto wallet integration due to gamer outrage, but remains the most popular home for DAOs, crypto organizations that operate on community voting.

Mastodon, a “decentralized social media platform” launched in 2016 that uses a network of open-source servers, gained 30,000 new signups the day Musk bought Twitter.

Even though some of these apps I’ve listed would say they have nothing to do with crypto, it’s striking how so many social media platforms are considering using decentralization, the utopian rallying cry of the crypto industry, to improve their UX or foster free speech.

I first wrote about bitcoin in 2011, and what excited me the most at the time was the ability to use crypto to pay for a paid news article, without the friction of entering information from your credit card and subscribe for an entire year. Along the same lines: what if the “killer app” for crypto and blockchain eventually becomes a better public square for social media?