Bots, micro-payments, and my Twitter Blue subscription
I confess that I am confused on many fronts these days. The list is long, and I will spare you for now. Today, I pick on Verification on the Web, Cryptocurrencies, and Twitter Blue.
Disclaimer: Twitter Blue Subscription became available in Switzerland (in March) and I subscribed.
I am aware that paid verification on social platforms is in vogue, but I will only talk about Twitter today.
The customer experience of subscribing had no friction. One can pay with Paypal or some credit card. The CX includes a bit of suspense, as it tells you `wait to be approved`. Maybe it wants to make you feel special if you get approved. For me, it made me wonder whether there is a Twitter account that paid and did not get approved (let me know if you had this experience or anyone you know of).
What also struck me was the conventional payment options coming from a company whose new CEO, has been a Dogecoin fanatic and whose nature is provocative and disruptive. There was no option to pay via MetaMask. Elon Musk`s and the company`s Twitter account haven’t integrated their Bitcoin and Ethereum wallet addresses. Don’t you think that people would tip Musk for many of his Tweets? Wouldn’t you buy Musk a coffee or a drink, if you had the opportunity to meet him, shake his hand, and show your admiration?
Twitter has enabled Mobile users to integrate in their profile their Bitcoin and Ethereum wallet addresses since Sep 2021. Strike is the provider that enabled this integration via APIs. Check on Twitter mobile my profile, Lex Sokolin`s, Chris Gledhill`s, David Birch`s, …. To see the integration widget to the left of the DM envelope widget.
I asked ChatGPT4 which are some top public figures that have integrated their Bitcoin wallet addresses on their Twitter account. It presented to me 5 names: Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey, Tim Draper, Michael Saylor, and Alex Gladstein. What a great example of ChatGPTs factual hallucinations that do seem plausible but are outright wrong! Only Alex Gladstein actually has the integration — check his Twitter profile on your mobile app.
Alex Gladstein is the Chief Strategy officer at The Human Rights Foundation (NGO — HRF). He frequently shares his insights on the Bitcoin Magazine. He is the author of ` CHECK YOUR FINANCIAL PRIVILEGE` book published on March 2022, which makes the case that for the 89% of the population born in non-reserve currency regimes and the outdated monetary systems, Bitcoin has real-life saving use cases.
*Proceeds from the purchase of Check Your Financial Privilege support the HRF
What type of payment options do you accept?
We accept all payments by Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, & PayPal.
We also take payments in installments by ShopPay and accept Bitcoin payments via OpenNode!
If Twitter will offer anyone a paid Subscription, then it should be offering all possible payment methods. There doesn’t seem to be any kind of verification process other than `payment received`.
The latest geographic split of Twitter users shows that there is a large Twitter user base in countries that are non-financially privileged. Plus, Japan which is tech and crypto-savvy, is a major user of Twitter. Actually, Twitter is the number one social media platform in Japan.
If Twitter wants to get rid of the bots, there is a very straightforward Bitcoin solution and I am not the first one to suggest it. To open and maintain a Twitter account, you need to pay the symbolic amount of 1 Satoshi to the company wallet (Twitter). It is a one-time payment that will not hurt the onboarding customer experience or deter the user (1 Satoshi is one-).
Bots are software that create new accounts (as they are free) and engage 24/7 relentlessly in new spammy ways. The introduction of this symbolic, fully digital, cost will result in a significant cost for the bot armies that create new accounts for every breath we take. At the same time, Twitter will not incur any significant costs to set up this process as it is fully digitized. Strike can easily implement this.
Based on the latest Twitter figures:
- Twitter has 396.5 million monthly active users in 2023
1 Bitcoin = 100 million Satoshis
If there were no bots, then Twitter would receive 369.5 Bitcoins if everybody paid 1 Satoshi to verify their account.
If bots account for 10% of monthly active users, then Twitter would receive a one-time lump sum of 332.55 Bitcoins.
If bots account for 30% of monthly active users, then Twitter would receive a one-time lump sum of 258.65 Bitcoins.
Dealing with bots by imposing this one-time symbolic micro-payment, is not difficult to implement on one platform like Twitter.
This real-world use case of micropayments via crypto to reduce the ease of creating bogus accounts on Twitter, Youtube, and other social media, also reminds us that Verification means very different things depending on the context.
On Twitter, Verification level I should be about whether you are a bot or not. To stop you from automatically creating new bot accounts, you should pay 1 Satoshi to open an account.
For those, that think this solution won’t work because most Twitter users are not familiar with crypto payments, I say that Elon Musk can make this happen and become the man that brought 200 million users into the world of Crypto and Web3 wallets. Web3 wallets are where we are heading for our digital identities, our digital assets (the ones we are already familiar with and the ones that are emerging).
Web 3 Wallets are for storing, for trading, for socializing, for interacting with the internet,…
Get a glimpse of this world from a recent report that lists 40 Upcoming Crypto & Smart-Contract Wallets Wallet Wars 2023 — Upcoming Crypto & Smart Contract wallet infrastructure services
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