Like many people, I was initially skeptical of Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, given his historical tendency to make bold promises and then back down. That said, his idea of adding a subscription layer to Twitter and using it to improve targeting and branch out from advertising is to his credit. If you believe in the core values of cryptocurrency, you should believe in it.
To see why, we have to review the basics of Bitcoin (BTC). Most people focus on currency, but the highlight of Satoshi Nakamoto’s invention was the design of the platform.
Before Bitcoin, the general belief was that an open (i.e. permissionless) system in which participants are anonymous and free to come and go could never be secure. Solutions such as Byzantine fault tolerance – the equivalent of network democracy – had solved the problem of participants reaching consensus in a closed system, but could not be applied to an open network due to the risk that a participant impersonating many, which is also known as a Sybil attack.
Sibylline attacks are a threat to any democratic system, hence the need to establish restrictions such as voter registration or parliamentary listing. They are especially annoying on the Internet, where it is easy for one person to impersonate many. Hence the prevalence of spam email, fake reviews and armies of bots on the internet.
Social networks, as designed today, solve this problem in the same way that payment systems (like PayPal) did in the past: They put an authority in charge and give them the power to censor some people. users to protect others. But this approach had its own drawbacks, such as some people being unfairly censored and the authority getting significant value for itself. Twitter’s current reliance on surveillance capitalism and its arbitrary (not to say unfair) blue tick solution are good examples.
Bitcoin took a different approach. It allowed anyone to do anything, even participate in consensus, but required an up-front cost from those doing the most important work. This was a positive form of self-censorship: Anyone could be a miner, but they had to show honest intent by spending money.
This proof-of-work (PoW) approach to creating resistance to sneaks has been successful, at least for a payment system. The Bitcoin platform is, paradoxically, the most open and the most secure on the Internet. Interestingly, PoW was originally invented in the 1990s to fight spam.
Elon Musk’s proposed subscription model for Twitter is philosophically similar.
Users who pay a monthly fee are less likely to be bots or click farms, so the rest of the network can trust them more, similar to how Bitcoin nodes gravitate towards miners who have done the most. “worked”.
If Twitter’s algorithm also prioritizes comments and retweets from subscribers, it can also improve curation, similar to how Proof-of-Stake (PoS) systems typically appoint a validator to propose a new block and empower to a committee of other validators to verify their work. All things being equal, a tweet from a paying subscriber that is liked and retweeted by other paying subscribers is more likely to be useful.
Those who complain that this approach discriminates against the poor do not understand how social networks work. Many creators are already paying to get more traction. Only they do it on the black market. Why else would there be so many ways to buy influence? Many fake accounts don’t happen by accident. Charging people directly has more integrity because we will know exactly who is paying.
Paying subscribers also allows Twitter to diversify from ad revenue, curbing surveillance capitalism. Currently, users who do not pay to buy influence continue to pay with their attention, which algorithms constantly try to hijack with polarizing content to sell more ads. Subscription models often lead to content that prioritizes quality over quantity, hence the success of Substack and Netflix.
Elon Musk has also hinted at the possibility of opening up the search algorithm and someday paying content creators. These features would bring the Bitcoin analogy full circle. If Twitter allows anyone to pay for a subscription and then redirects a portion of that revenue to the most popular creators and curators, it will better align incentives between content creators and consumers. In Bitcoin, the greedy miner is forced to become the most honest. Twitter should work the same way.
To be clear, a centralized platform owned by private investors is still a long way from a fully decentralized network like Bitcoin. But the idea of introducing a cost for doing the most important work, and then rewarding those who do good work, is possibly the most important contribution cryptocurrencies have made to society. We should applaud any attempt to port these ideas to existing platforms, no matter how limited.
One day, hopefully, we will have decentralized social media. Until then, we can use a better Twitter.
Omid Malekan is a nine-year veteran of the cryptocurrency industry and adjunct professor at Columbia Business School, where he teaches classes on blockchain and cryptocurrencies. He is the author of the next book Re-Architecting Trust: The Curse of History and the Crypto Cure for Money, Markets, and Platforms.
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