It was a tweet heard ‘round the world.
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and founder of Tesla, launched a bid to take over Twitter.
On Thursday, the centibillionaire tweeted a “take it or leave it” bid for 100% of the company at a price of $54.20 per share.
That amounts to a $43 billion market cap, or about 20% higher than current prices.
The bid came a few weeks after Musk became Twitter’s largest shareholder with a 9.2% stake.
He has been a staunch critic of the company, which is a platform for people to engage in daily discourse.
“I invested in Twitter, as I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe,” Musk said in a letter on Wednesday.
He wrote: “I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy.”
Musk’s sentiment is right. But buying Twitter is a terrible idea, especially at $43 billion.
Fortunately, there’s a better social media idea out there.
A Twitter 2.0, if you will.
And it has the potential to be better and faster.
It’s a solution proposed by an under-the-radar crypto billionaire.
And it’s powered by the same technology that runs cryptocurrencies: the blockchain…
A Decentralized Twitter
The key idea behind blockchains is that they’re decentralized messaging systems.
A transaction is simply a message that person A is sending bitcoin to person B.
Because the network is open source, anyone can track these transactions.
That’s why billionaire and FTX exchange founder Sam Bankman-Fried suggested an alternative.
Instead of buying Twitter, someone should create their own decentralized version of it.
Bankman-Fried proposed that all tweets go on-chain. It would be just like how someone would transact a crypto.
The sender can choose who has access to these tweets. He or she might want to make them public or create a direct message with a privacy setting.
He suggested the way to monetize a decentralized Twitter would be to charge something like $0.01 per tweet.
At 500 million tweets a day, that would replace half of Twitter’s revenue.
How On-Chain Social Media Would Work
Since these messages are on a blockchain, users would control their own data.
An open-source blockchain means that anyone could build their own Twitter application on top of it.
That lets them use whatever messages senders choose to make public.
That means competing versions of Twitter can exist that tap into the same messaging system.
But they would include only messages that their users want to read.
Bankman-Fried also surmised that Solana’s cheap network fees (approximately $0.0005 per message) would be a great place to start.
And because everything is built on-chain, payments to content creators would be easy to implement.
Bankman-Fried concluded by saying it would be “hard, but not that hard” to build.
He added: “We could do it. And if there was sufficient demand, we would do it, fast.”
Maybe he won’t need to.
Perhaps Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey already has plans for a decentralized version.
After all, he’s already changed the name of his other company, Square, to Block.
Regards,
Editor, Strategic Fortunes
P.S. 2.0 is always bigger and better than 1.0. And there’s a 2.0 version of cryptos that’s about to dominate. In his new presentation, Ian King discusses the “Next Gen Coin” and why it’s going to mint a ton of millionaires over the next decade. Click here to watch it now.
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