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> In this emerging model, Twitter could have adopted a > protocol-based approach and issued a crypto-token, > Twokens, that users could earn from th
by runeks 10y ago
> In this emerging model, Twitter could have adopted a
> protocol-based approach and issued a crypto-token,
> Twokens, that users could earn from things like amassing
> followers, reporting abuse, etc. Twokens could also be sold
> by the Twitter founding team to finance their operations.
> Crypto-exchanges could make a market in Twokens so that
> anyone who wanted to speculate on the future value of the
> Twitter protocol could do so.
I don't understand this line of thought. A Twoken would be a sort of irredeemable financial instrument, which Twitter would issue hoping that speculators would mistakenly value these tokens based on the value of Twitter, as a company?
Common stock in Twitter is a financial instrument that gives you part ownership of Twitter. It has value because Twitter, as a company, has value. Twokens would be a financial instrument that gives you nothing, except the hope that other people will misunderstand this fact and buy them, pushing up the (offer) price. Great for speculators, useless for everyone else.
- cocktailpeanuts 10y agoYeah I think there's a fine line between a new age business model and a pyramid scheme. This is the same reason why a lot of people criticize the Bitcoin ecosystem, people have monetary incentive to bring others into the ecosystem. This is different from BitTorrent, another successful decentralized model, where nobody has monetary interest to bring another in, yet it's still viral since each user gets immediate value out of using it. That's why I am dubious about this logic because there needs to be a clear relative up-front value compared to other alternatives (not some religious belief), yet the intrinsic barrier to usage baked into the model makes it inferior to its centralized alternatives.
- lisper 10y agoNo, twokens would have had value because you could redeem them for a share of the audience on Twitter.
- runeks 10y ago> [...] redeem them for a share of the audience on Twitter. I don't understand what you mean by this. Can you clarify?
- lisper 10y agoI don't really know how to make it any clearer. Twitter could, if they chose to, "sell eyeballs" by promoting/preferring certain accounts and/or tweets over others. They could sell these preferences and promotions for twokens, which would in turn lend some legitimacy to the promotions because twokens would have to be "earned" somehow. I'm not saying this would necessarily be a raging success, only that Twitter could ground the value of twokens in their ecosystem.