Elon Musk is an unabashed fan of cryptocurrency. His company, Tesla, once had nearly $2 billion in bitcoin before he sold a bunch of it. He also tweets often about dogecoin.
Musk sees a big role for crypto on Twitter. He will face a high rise.
In recent months, Musk has thrown out many ideas about how crypto tokens and ideologies could be useful on Twitter, leading enthusiasts to believe that he will help bring their way of thinking into the mainstream.
But what can Musk actually do with cryptocurrency on the platform? The Post researched his many statements on the subject, then spoke with crypto regulators, watchdogs and content creators to assess both their feasibility and potential impact.
Musk said at a TED Talk in Vancouver this year that he saw stopping crypto fraud as hugely important.
“A top priority I would have is to eliminate the spam and scam bots and bot armies that are on Twitter,” he said of the site. “If I had a dogecoin for every crypto scam I saw, we’d have 100 billion dogecoins.” (Spokespersons for Twitter and Tesla did not respond to requesting comment from Musk.)
Of the more than $1 billion lost to crypto scams since the beginning of last year, watchdogs say a large portion has been lost via Twitter scams — some of which, curiously, involve impersonations of Musk himself.
Musk has yet to announce what tools he will use to achieve his goal. But regulators who have been trying hard to solve this problem don’t think he can keep his promise, saying no technology can stop fraudsters from tweeting.
“I’m naturally skeptical,” Joe Rotunda, director of enforcement at the Texas Securities Board, said in a text message to The Post. “If Mr. Musk is able to significantly curtail crypto fraud on Twitter, he will have accomplished something that many tech professionals consider impossible.”
He believes dogecoin can be used for Twitter transactions.
Although dogecoin was designed back in 2013 as a sarcastic comment on crypto, Musk has been working with doge developers and believes the token is “pretty cool.” When the news first broke that he might buy Twitter, he even proposed that a Blue premium subscription could be bought in doge.
Dogecoin’s value has doubled since Musk began formalizing his purchase last week, and after he tweeted a photo of the doge mascot breed Shiba Inu in a Twitter shirt.
Tech experts have noted that the idea of bringing doge to Twitter is plausible. given that the transactions can happen ten times as fast as bitcoin, whose slow transaction speed has hampered adoption. But it’s unclear exactly what Musk’s Twitter will sell. (The site currently allows “tips” in bitcoin.) And while dogecoin can process transactions faster than bitcoin, traditional forms of payment such as Visa can process them hundreds of times as quickly as doge.
He wants looser content moderation, which could boost crypto votes.
Users on crypto-Twitter — the parts of the site where large numbers of people share tips and often troll each other — have long expressed the belief that the system could punish them. That’s especially true with shadow bans, which is when the algorithm limits how much other users see them.
Musk and other leaders of the new Twitter say they will take a looser approach to content moderation. Musk told advertisers last week that his Twitter would be a place “where a wide range of beliefs can be discussed in a healthy way.” On Tuesday, Binance CEO and Musk ally Changpeng Zhao said that promise extended to crypto.
“Twitter is a town square for crypto, and most of the world’s hot topics, so it’s a good place to support free speech,” he told Yahoo Finance Live.
While users on crypto Twitter noted that Musk has not yet changed content moderation guidelines, some crypto influencers say they’re noticing a difference.
PlanB, a controversial bitcoin influencer, tweeted this week that his account appears to be gaining more visibility since Musk’s takeover.
“Elon said they didn’t change POLICERS, but they sure did remove some BANS,” PlanB wrote. “Read hundreds of people commenting on my previous tweet and seeing my tweets again after 9 months of nothing.” In a message to The Post, PlanB elaborated on the thought, saying he believed Twitter “just stopped showing my tweets to my own followers,” adding that he believes such moves could affect markets as investors are left in the dark.
He wants to run Twitter more like crypto.
A central tenet of the crypto world is that institutions can be run in a more decentralized way, with a large community making collective decisions instead of a top-down executive structure. Both bitcoin and ethereum work more or less this way.
Musk has said he wants to do just that. In text messages to Twitter founder Jack Dorsey earlier this year, he noted that he wants to turn the platform into “something new that’s decentralized.”
Could it actually happen?
Some in the crypto world think it can. “A steering group full of diverse thinkers was mentioned. This is a good first step,” Alanna Roazzi-Laforet, founder of Decrypt Studios and publisher of Decrypt Media, said in a statement to The mail. “The next thing is … a governance and a plan to bring governance to the community,” she said, citing Krishnan as the figure who could push for that.
But critics are not convinced.
“Twitter is never going to be meaningfully governed” by a decentralized force, crypto skeptic David Gerard said in his own message to The Post. “Musk is the owner. I would be surprised if he ever allowed anyone to gain effective control. He’s Elon Musk!”
He can reverse Twitter’s pro-NFT stance.
You may have seen Twitter profile pictures that act as NFTs, the non-fungible tokens that watermark a photo to one user. That’s because Twitter policymakers in January allowed users to hyperlink their NFTs to their wallets — a notable step since it means a profile picture is now officially certified as an NFT.
Musk has actually been a public critic of NFTs, insinuating in a meme that they are all just one hallucinations of psychiatric patients. And Musk really didn’t like the Twitter policy. In a tweet in January he wrote: “Twitter is spending tech resources on this…while crypto scammers throw a spambot block party in every thread!?”
Musk may have to act on his faith soon: As he prepared to take over Twitter, the company’s developer account announced it will roll out a “tweet Tiles” feature that will facilitate off-site NFT sales.
