5 ms·

Crypto exchange Binance, Musk's co-investor, to help Twitter with blockchain

30 points by perihelions 4y ago

tromp 4y ago
> Musk discussed the possibility of placing Twitter on the blockchain, though he later appeared to decide such a move would not work. What does that even mean?
- aphroz 4y ago
  That you would have to pay gas to tweet
  - williamcotton 4y ago
    Perhaps advertisers could pay the gas for users? Could users pay for their own costs and have an ad-free experience? Could users give gas to publishers in response to content they enjoy? There’s room for a lot of economic incentives! Could users sell 70% of their tweet revenue for 7 years to another entity that gives them cash up front? Like existing music publishers? https://github.com/williamcotton/openpublish https://github.com/williamcotton/openpublish
    - weego 4y ago
      There's is literally zero public appetite for anything that poses any of those questions, let alone attempts to answer them. The intersection of technology and people to define a usable product cannot also be defined as a technology.
      - vntok 4y ago
        Users regularly do "pay for their own costs and have an ad-free experience", for example on Youtube, Netflix or The New York Time (5 million paid subscribers in Q2 2021). Users regularly do "give gas to publishers in response to content they enjoy", for example on Patreon, Twitch or Medium. The appetite seems there all right.
      - williamcotton 4y ago
        There’s a public appetite for all sorts of intellectual property. Popular music is funded by artists who sell parts of their rights to their profits from music and recordings. As opposed to a patronage model, intellectual property allows for people to engage in the market with their published works. Intellectual property has lots of problems of course but it is also the model that replaced patronage as we transitioned from the ancien regime into our contemporary politic-economic system.
    - ShamelessC 4y ago
      That all sounds kind of nightmarish. Keep in mind, many live paycheck to paycheck. The prevailing VC-minded attitude that the economy needs market-makers, micro-transactions and “decentralized digital rights management” is just not at all what people need or want currently.
      - vntok 4y ago
        You are in no position to decide what people need or what they should spend their money on. On the contrary, micro-transactions is the ideal way for regular folks to support content creators in a way that does not take too much from them. No one struggling wants to pay a platform's minimum support level of $5/month times 20 people whose videos they like. Paying $5/month to 20 people whose videos they like though, that's much easier to handle.
        ShamelessC 4y ago
        > On the contrary, micro-transactions is the ideal way for regular folks to support content creators in a way that does not take too much from them. In your idealized theoretical market conditions*, and assuming the tech works currently as I mentioned (it doesn’t in my opinion but that debate has already been had). You might be right, but not until (another) significant engineering effort is established (unlikely given the state of the economy) and not without the blessing of various nation states.
        williamcotton 4y ago
        One of the reasons that I stopped working on such a system [0] is that I realized that there was no way to bootstrap such a system from scratch. I would like to see the involvement of nation states to facilitate such a system but the political will for having a truly republican system that expands upon copyright, patents, trademarks, et al, for the digital age seems decades away. People are too worried that their political opponents will abuse such a system when in power, even if such a system is probably inevitable. [0] https://github.com/williamcotton/openpublish https://github.com/williamcotton/openpublish
    - KaiserPro 4y ago
      Why would I, as a publisher, pay for tweet futures, when I can just scrape them for free? Why would I pay for futures on a platform that encourages people to make ill-informed context free pronouncements, with an incredibly short half life?
      - williamcotton 4y ago
        Why are music publishers paying for future profits from a given work being recorded and distributed on Spotify when people can just go on BitTorrent and get the recording for free? Is there a lower bound of a market for published works? Are tweets below that bound? Are tweets of video content or photographs below that bound? Perhaps! Does the current socioeconomic system of Twitter have in impact on ill-informed context free pronouncements? Would a different socioeconomic system encourage different content?
  - Beldin 4y ago
    Frankly, it isn't weird to pay to access a scarce resource. Now we're paying with our personal details... paying with other means might turn out better for society.
    - quickthrower2 4y ago
      But would you spend $10 to say that? Or just register your own domain and say whatever you like forever :-)
      - williamcotton 4y ago
        You can stand in the middle of the wilderness on a soap box distributing pamphlets or you can stand in the town square on a soap box distributing pamphlets.
        quickthrower2 4y ago
        A new twitter account by joe average is also wilderness. This is more a case of “famous guests on talkshow” than “London’s speakers corner”. It is marginally easier to get a twitter following. But yoursite + (youtube, facebook, reddit etc.) can build a following too.
        williamcotton 4y ago
        That it is marginally easier shows that a digital town square is some kind of natural monopoly, doesn’t it? FWIW, I deleted my Twitter and Facebook accounts in 2016 and it has felt somewhat like I’m living in the digital wilderness, to the benefit of my mental health! There is still a cost to living up yonder in them hills.
      - birracerveza 4y ago
        No, but I would spend $0.0001 to post a comment, which is what it would cost on basically any other chain that isn't ethereum
  - denton-scratch 4y ago
    This is about Bitcoin, no? Isn't "gas" associated with Ethereum? /me a blockchain virgin
    - JetSpiegel 4y ago
      Ponzis all look the same to me.
- bambax 4y ago
  Probably nothing. But if you add "blockchain" to something completely unrelated, some people get very excited and start throwing money at you. This includes, I'm ashamed to say, the French government, who has said that finance regulation rules should be eased for all things crypto.
- Havoc 4y ago
  He probably meant mirroring twitter discussion onto blockchain as a permanent record in the free speech sense. Guessing the lawyers pointed out that this is rather problematic if someone posts something highly illegal (CP or whatever)
  - ShamelessC 4y ago
    Also highly impractical compared to e.g. BitTorrent, Mastodon replicas.
  - rjh29 4y ago
    The Bitcoin blockchain supports arbitrary data payloads (as do most blockchains), I've always wondered how they deal with that problem.
    - williamcotton 4y ago
      They ask you to please not use the blockchain for data storage, as the Bitcoin Core devs told me at a conference in 2014 when I showed them this method of storing ~1k of data: https://github.com/williamcotton/blockcast https://github.com/williamcotton/blockcast
- KaiserPro 4y ago
  > What does that even mean? if I'm being charitable, it means that Musk looked at the problem, saw that it was a terrible idea and pushed it to one side If I'm not being charitable, he looked at the idea despite the previous experience of the blockchain being useless for all but a tiny application, and still forced people to debate the idea, despite it being patent bollocks
- est 4y ago
  It means no more deleted account or tweets?
eschneider 4y ago
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  There would be one good thing through: run a node and view a non-algorithmic feed!
thinkingemote 4y ago
In the published discovery chats of the recent lawsuit it was kind of clear that Musk rejects the idea of blockchain as fundamental tech for any type of social media. But I suppose this doesn't preclude payments etc. The reason from what I recall was something like "social media on blockchain requires huge tech resources which means centralisation". Basically the discussions were very similar to HN! Blockchain is totally the wrong thing to build big stuff around it but it has it's uses elsewhere
- stubish 4y ago
  Even Binance doesn't know how it fits together. Personally, I think you are better off doing your brainstorming before you plonk down a wad of cash. Still, they got their headline and maybe a bump in their share price.
- coffeeblack 4y ago
  Sounds more like a case of “use the right tool for the job” thing. Having a cryptographically signed distributed ledger makes a lot of sense to store financial transaction data that should never be edited later. It makes no sense to store conversations that may be required by courts to be changed or where the author wants to edit an old comment.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    It would make sense if the goal is to create something that is immutable at all costs: even if illegal content or speech is shared on the platform and there is no right to scrub data. I don’t think that is many people’s goal.
phphphphp 4y ago
Filler article that adds nothing. A different article about Binance’s role in the deal quoted Binance as saying (paraphrasing) we have no idea what musk is doing or thinking, he doesn’t even acknowledge us, we are just along for the ride. Binance may well be forming a Twitter-on-the-blockchain team but it has zero involvement from Twitter — unless something changes.
- thefounder 4y ago
  Binance sounds like the typical crypto investor: I don't know what it is but I'm gonna buy it anyway
blunderkid 4y ago
- andirk 4y ago
  Is USD a scam? It's based on "faith" but pretty much works. Does that make it legit or a scam? If you have enough bombs and willing to spill enough blood to defend said faith, then it's legit? Crypto is a broad term and you paint it with 1 color: scam!
  - KaiserPro 4y ago
    > Is USD a scam? not really. unless you treat large parts of capitalism a scam. (thats rhetorical by the way) Binance which lost $570M in one hack, knowingly promoted flawed investments and lied to regulators however, could be described as an unreliable finance partner.
    - phyalow 4y ago
      I mean you could also lump nearly almost every single major investment bank and commercial bank in the category “unreliable finance partner”…
  - chx 4y ago
    Crypto"currencies" are a scam because they are a negative sum game. Imagine an empty room. A few people come in with money in their pockets and play a few rounds of a card game. When they leave, since nothing was in the room before and nothing is in there after, it's obvious the total sum of money couldn't change. Some got richer, some got poorer but the total is the same. If they decided to exchange money for plastic chips to be used during their games and exchange it for money at the end, the same is still true. However, if someone takes a cut every time chips are moved then that person is guaranteed to win and the players in total are guaranteed to lose. If you have a game where you know who is the winner and who are the loser without knowing anything about the game, I believe it's fair to call that a scam. No, stocks are not like this because they produce dividends and gold is not like this either because there are consumers (jewelers, electronics industry) who buy gold add value to it and only sell the value added product. With a crypto"currency" none of this happens. You buy coins, sell the same and they just rot ("HODL" in modern parlance) meanwhile. And you lose money on every transaction. Sure, the price change might mean you leave with a monetary profit but it only means a greater fool is now sitting on a larger loss. This is a very novel scam for many obvious reasons but that doesn't mean it's not a scam.
bhouston 4y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if Twitter becomes a crypto-wallet in this way. Everyone with a Twitter account now as a Binance Wallet (or maybe it will have Twitter branding?) Sort of similar to if you have a Google gmail account, you also have a Calendar account, a Google Drive account, etc.
- tpxl 4y ago
  Crypto exchanges have very strict KYC and AML rules. There's no chance in hell people are going through KYC/AML processes to use twitter.
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    They already ask for mobile phone number, which in turn is a KYC’d service by a telco.
    - tpxl 4y ago
      Not enough to cover KYC legislation.
    - m00dy 4y ago
      Not every mobile phone numbers are KYC'd.
      - quickthrower2 4y ago
        The point is enough people (not all) put up with providing ID for their phone purchase or their phone number for twitter that a more thorough check for Twitter might be tolerated. Especially if there is a little paypal in there too.
    - denton-scratch 4y ago
      The "know your customer" rules that finance services have to perform are far more stringent than those performed by telcos. Hell, I can walk 5 minutes to the corner shop and buy a PAYG SIM for cash, without giving any personal details.
mattdesl 4y ago
The idea of a CEX directing this kind of engineering effort sounds like a nightmare. Tangentially related, see below for a better idea of “Twitter on the blockchain”: https://www.varunsrinivasan.com/2022/01/11/sufficient-decentralization-for-social-networks https://www.varunsrinivasan.com/2022/01/11/sufficient-decent...
rodolphoarruda 4y ago
Binance is extremely competent in helping companies of any kind to use the Blockchain. Their time to market is unmatched in this business. What I have noticed as an observer is that companies can hit the market faster, test their value prop, iterate and execute the next steps on a solid base with the help of a strong partner. Much better than doing it all by themselves reinventing wheels on a daily basis.
- orwin 4y ago
  Does Binance help them with security? wasn't the biggest hacks of the last 2 years on companies helped by binance? They seems to understand the space pretty well and avoid obvious scams, but i would be wary of asking them for security support :/
- Rhedox 4y ago
  > in helping companies of any kind to use the Blockchain Such as? There's pretty much no problem that isn't solved better by a solution that doesn't involve a blockchain.
jongjong 4y ago
It wouldn't make sense to store tweets on a blockchain... It would be too wasteful; this level of redundancy is not needed. But it would be a good idea to implement a blockchain-based payment system which integrates with Twitter somehow.

30 points by perihelions 4y ago

> Musk discussed the possibility of placing Twitter on the blockchain, though he later appeared to decide such a move would not work. What does that even mean?

aphroz 4y ago
That you would have to pay gas to tweet
- williamcotton 4y ago
  Perhaps advertisers could pay the gas for users? Could users pay for their own costs and have an ad-free experience? Could users give gas to publishers in response to content they enjoy? There’s room for a lot of economic incentives! Could users sell 70% of their tweet revenue for 7 years to another entity that gives them cash up front? Like existing music publishers? https://github.com/williamcotton/openpublish https://github.com/williamcotton/openpublish
  - weego 4y ago
    There's is literally zero public appetite for anything that poses any of those questions, let alone attempts to answer them. The intersection of technology and people to define a usable product cannot also be defined as a technology.
    - vntok 4y ago
      Users regularly do "pay for their own costs and have an ad-free experience", for example on Youtube, Netflix or The New York Time (5 million paid subscribers in Q2 2021). Users regularly do "give gas to publishers in response to content they enjoy", for example on Patreon, Twitch or Medium. The appetite seems there all right.
    - williamcotton 4y ago
      There’s a public appetite for all sorts of intellectual property. Popular music is funded by artists who sell parts of their rights to their profits from music and recordings. As opposed to a patronage model, intellectual property allows for people to engage in the market with their published works. Intellectual property has lots of problems of course but it is also the model that replaced patronage as we transitioned from the ancien regime into our contemporary politic-economic system.
  - ShamelessC 4y ago
    That all sounds kind of nightmarish. Keep in mind, many live paycheck to paycheck. The prevailing VC-minded attitude that the economy needs market-makers, micro-transactions and “decentralized digital rights management” is just not at all what people need or want currently.
    - vntok 4y ago
      You are in no position to decide what people need or what they should spend their money on. On the contrary, micro-transactions is the ideal way for regular folks to support content creators in a way that does not take too much from them. No one struggling wants to pay a platform's minimum support level of $5/month times 20 people whose videos they like. Paying $5/month to 20 people whose videos they like though, that's much easier to handle.
      - ShamelessC 4y ago
        > On the contrary, micro-transactions is the ideal way for regular folks to support content creators in a way that does not take too much from them. In your idealized theoretical market conditions*, and assuming the tech works currently as I mentioned (it doesn’t in my opinion but that debate has already been had). You might be right, but not until (another) significant engineering effort is established (unlikely given the state of the economy) and not without the blessing of various nation states.
        williamcotton 4y ago
        One of the reasons that I stopped working on such a system [0] is that I realized that there was no way to bootstrap such a system from scratch. I would like to see the involvement of nation states to facilitate such a system but the political will for having a truly republican system that expands upon copyright, patents, trademarks, et al, for the digital age seems decades away. People are too worried that their political opponents will abuse such a system when in power, even if such a system is probably inevitable. [0] https://github.com/williamcotton/openpublish https://github.com/williamcotton/openpublish
  - KaiserPro 4y ago
    Why would I, as a publisher, pay for tweet futures, when I can just scrape them for free? Why would I pay for futures on a platform that encourages people to make ill-informed context free pronouncements, with an incredibly short half life?
    - williamcotton 4y ago
      Why are music publishers paying for future profits from a given work being recorded and distributed on Spotify when people can just go on BitTorrent and get the recording for free? Is there a lower bound of a market for published works? Are tweets below that bound? Are tweets of video content or photographs below that bound? Perhaps! Does the current socioeconomic system of Twitter have in impact on ill-informed context free pronouncements? Would a different socioeconomic system encourage different content?
- Beldin 4y ago
  Frankly, it isn't weird to pay to access a scarce resource. Now we're paying with our personal details... paying with other means might turn out better for society.
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    But would you spend $10 to say that? Or just register your own domain and say whatever you like forever :-)
    - williamcotton 4y ago
      You can stand in the middle of the wilderness on a soap box distributing pamphlets or you can stand in the town square on a soap box distributing pamphlets.
      - quickthrower2 4y ago
        A new twitter account by joe average is also wilderness. This is more a case of “famous guests on talkshow” than “London’s speakers corner”. It is marginally easier to get a twitter following. But yoursite + (youtube, facebook, reddit etc.) can build a following too.
        williamcotton 4y ago
        That it is marginally easier shows that a digital town square is some kind of natural monopoly, doesn’t it? FWIW, I deleted my Twitter and Facebook accounts in 2016 and it has felt somewhat like I’m living in the digital wilderness, to the benefit of my mental health! There is still a cost to living up yonder in them hills.
    - birracerveza 4y ago
      No, but I would spend $0.0001 to post a comment, which is what it would cost on basically any other chain that isn't ethereum
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  This is about Bitcoin, no? Isn't "gas" associated with Ethereum? /me a blockchain virgin
  - JetSpiegel 4y ago
    Ponzis all look the same to me.
bambax 4y ago
Probably nothing. But if you add "blockchain" to something completely unrelated, some people get very excited and start throwing money at you. This includes, I'm ashamed to say, the French government, who has said that finance regulation rules should be eased for all things crypto.
Havoc 4y ago
He probably meant mirroring twitter discussion onto blockchain as a permanent record in the free speech sense. Guessing the lawyers pointed out that this is rather problematic if someone posts something highly illegal (CP or whatever)
- ShamelessC 4y ago
  Also highly impractical compared to e.g. BitTorrent, Mastodon replicas.
- rjh29 4y ago
  The Bitcoin blockchain supports arbitrary data payloads (as do most blockchains), I've always wondered how they deal with that problem.
  - williamcotton 4y ago
    They ask you to please not use the blockchain for data storage, as the Bitcoin Core devs told me at a conference in 2014 when I showed them this method of storing ~1k of data: https://github.com/williamcotton/blockcast https://github.com/williamcotton/blockcast
KaiserPro 4y ago
> What does that even mean? if I'm being charitable, it means that Musk looked at the problem, saw that it was a terrible idea and pushed it to one side If I'm not being charitable, he looked at the idea despite the previous experience of the blockchain being useless for all but a tiny application, and still forced people to debate the idea, despite it being patent bollocks
est 4y ago
It means no more deleted account or tweets?

eschneider 4y ago

quickthrower2 4y ago
There would be one good thing through: run a node and view a non-algorithmic feed!

thinkingemote 4y ago

In the published discovery chats of the recent lawsuit it was kind of clear that Musk rejects the idea of blockchain as fundamental tech for any type of social media. But I suppose this doesn't preclude payments etc. The reason from what I recall was something like "social media on blockchain requires huge tech resources which means centralisation". Basically the discussions were very similar to HN! Blockchain is totally the wrong thing to build big stuff around it but it has it's uses elsewhere

stubish 4y ago
Even Binance doesn't know how it fits together. Personally, I think you are better off doing your brainstorming before you plonk down a wad of cash. Still, they got their headline and maybe a bump in their share price.
coffeeblack 4y ago
Sounds more like a case of “use the right tool for the job” thing. Having a cryptographically signed distributed ledger makes a lot of sense to store financial transaction data that should never be edited later. It makes no sense to store conversations that may be required by courts to be changed or where the author wants to edit an old comment.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  It would make sense if the goal is to create something that is immutable at all costs: even if illegal content or speech is shared on the platform and there is no right to scrub data. I don’t think that is many people’s goal.

phphphphp 4y ago

Filler article that adds nothing. A different article about Binance’s role in the deal quoted Binance as saying (paraphrasing) we have no idea what musk is doing or thinking, he doesn’t even acknowledge us, we are just along for the ride. Binance may well be forming a Twitter-on-the-blockchain team but it has zero involvement from Twitter — unless something changes.

thefounder 4y ago
Binance sounds like the typical crypto investor: I don't know what it is but I'm gonna buy it anyway

blunderkid 4y ago

andirk 4y ago
Is USD a scam? It's based on "faith" but pretty much works. Does that make it legit or a scam? If you have enough bombs and willing to spill enough blood to defend said faith, then it's legit? Crypto is a broad term and you paint it with 1 color: scam!
- KaiserPro 4y ago
  > Is USD a scam? not really. unless you treat large parts of capitalism a scam. (thats rhetorical by the way) Binance which lost $570M in one hack, knowingly promoted flawed investments and lied to regulators however, could be described as an unreliable finance partner.
  - phyalow 4y ago
    I mean you could also lump nearly almost every single major investment bank and commercial bank in the category “unreliable finance partner”…
- chx 4y ago
  Crypto"currencies" are a scam because they are a negative sum game. Imagine an empty room. A few people come in with money in their pockets and play a few rounds of a card game. When they leave, since nothing was in the room before and nothing is in there after, it's obvious the total sum of money couldn't change. Some got richer, some got poorer but the total is the same. If they decided to exchange money for plastic chips to be used during their games and exchange it for money at the end, the same is still true. However, if someone takes a cut every time chips are moved then that person is guaranteed to win and the players in total are guaranteed to lose. If you have a game where you know who is the winner and who are the loser without knowing anything about the game, I believe it's fair to call that a scam. No, stocks are not like this because they produce dividends and gold is not like this either because there are consumers (jewelers, electronics industry) who buy gold add value to it and only sell the value added product. With a crypto"currency" none of this happens. You buy coins, sell the same and they just rot ("HODL" in modern parlance) meanwhile. And you lose money on every transaction. Sure, the price change might mean you leave with a monetary profit but it only means a greater fool is now sitting on a larger loss. This is a very novel scam for many obvious reasons but that doesn't mean it's not a scam.

bhouston 4y ago

I wouldn't be surprised if Twitter becomes a crypto-wallet in this way. Everyone with a Twitter account now as a Binance Wallet (or maybe it will have Twitter branding?) Sort of similar to if you have a Google gmail account, you also have a Calendar account, a Google Drive account, etc.

tpxl 4y ago
Crypto exchanges have very strict KYC and AML rules. There's no chance in hell people are going through KYC/AML processes to use twitter.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  They already ask for mobile phone number, which in turn is a KYC’d service by a telco.
  - tpxl 4y ago
    Not enough to cover KYC legislation.
  - m00dy 4y ago
    Not every mobile phone numbers are KYC'd.
    - quickthrower2 4y ago
      The point is enough people (not all) put up with providing ID for their phone purchase or their phone number for twitter that a more thorough check for Twitter might be tolerated. Especially if there is a little paypal in there too.
  - denton-scratch 4y ago
    The "know your customer" rules that finance services have to perform are far more stringent than those performed by telcos. Hell, I can walk 5 minutes to the corner shop and buy a PAYG SIM for cash, without giving any personal details.

mattdesl 4y ago

The idea of a CEX directing this kind of engineering effort sounds like a nightmare. Tangentially related, see below for a better idea of “Twitter on the blockchain”: https://www.varunsrinivasan.com/2022/01/11/sufficient-decentralization-for-social-networks https://www.varunsrinivasan.com/2022/01/11/sufficient-decent...

rodolphoarruda 4y ago

Binance is extremely competent in helping companies of any kind to use the Blockchain. Their time to market is unmatched in this business. What I have noticed as an observer is that companies can hit the market faster, test their value prop, iterate and execute the next steps on a solid base with the help of a strong partner. Much better than doing it all by themselves reinventing wheels on a daily basis.

orwin 4y ago
Does Binance help them with security? wasn't the biggest hacks of the last 2 years on companies helped by binance? They seems to understand the space pretty well and avoid obvious scams, but i would be wary of asking them for security support :/
Rhedox 4y ago
> in helping companies of any kind to use the Blockchain Such as? There's pretty much no problem that isn't solved better by a solution that doesn't involve a blockchain.

jongjong 4y ago

It wouldn't make sense to store tweets on a blockchain... It would be too wasteful; this level of redundancy is not needed. But it would be a good idea to implement a blockchain-based payment system which integrates with Twitter somehow.