Crypto fans should get behind Elon Musk’s subscription model for Twitter
Like many people, I was originally dubious of Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter given his historic tendency to make bold promises but later back away. That said, there is merit to his idea of adding a subscription layer to Twitter and using it to both improve curation and diversify away from advertising. If you believe in the core values of crypto, you should believe in it.
To see why, we need to revisit the basics of Bitcoin (BTC). Most people focus their attention on the coin, but the more remarkable thing about Satoshi Nakamoto’s invention was the design of the platform.
Before Bitcoin, the general belief was that an open (aka permissionless) system where participants are anonymous and free to come and go could never be secured. Solutions like Byzantine fault tolerance — the network equivalent of democracy — had solved the problem of participants reaching consensus in a closed system, but couldn’t be applied to an open network due to the risk of one participant pretending to be many, also known as a Sybil attack.
Sybil attacks are a threat to any democratic system, thus the need for restrictions like voter registration or parliamentary roll call. They are particularly pesky online, where one person pretending to be many people is easy. Thus the prevalence of spam email, fake reviews and bot armies on the internet.
Social media as designed today solves this problem in the same way that payment systems (like PayPal) did in the past: They put an authority in charge and give it the power to censor some users to protect others. But this approach had its own drawbacks, including some people being censored unfairly and the authority extracting significant value for itself. Twitter’s current reliance on surveillance capitalism,
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