"Musk Wants to Buy Twitter, FTX Founder: My Thoughts on Decentralized Twitter"

FTX founder and CEO SBF, also a Twitter user like Musk, shared his thoughts after Musk's proposal to buy Twitter.

What Could a Decentralized Twitter Look Like?

SBF believes that a decentralized Twitter could involve all tweets being stored on a blockchain and encrypted. The sender can choose who can view these messages and who can decrypt them. In a way, this would make direct messages and tweets the same thing, with direct messages simply being encrypted tweets.

There could be two forms of "profit": tweet-level, where a protocol charges per message. If there are around five billion tweets per day and each tweet costs $0.01, this could replace half of Twitter's current profits. The other form is UI-level, where the user interface can generate revenue or subsidies, for example, by displaying ads to pay for network costs.

SBF also mentioned that because it's all on-chain messages, users can control their own data. This means everyone can build their own Twitter user interfaces, such as interfaces that seamlessly thread tweets together, and these interfaces can collaborate to create an ecosystem and generate revenue or subsidies by charging for user interfaces. Each user interface will have its own terms of service, rather than one person or company controlling speech.

Lower-Level Chains Will Actively Scale to Meet Social Platform Needs

SBF also discussed Solana. He gave an example that if the network fee is around $0.0005, Solana's fees would only contribute a small portion of the profit. This will also drive some lower-level chains to actively scale to hundreds of thousands of TPS, and if you add on-chain likes and reposts, you would need millions of TPS. He said, in any case, this will eventually happen.

SBF mentioned that if everything has to be processed on-chain, there are many trivial things to integrate: tipping mechanisms, payments, content creator profit models, NFTs, personal profile pages, and avatars. And what about DOGE coin?

Is Decentralizing Twitter Really a Good Idea?

SBF agrees because Twitter only nets $300 million a year, but who knows. Perhaps this will make social media more democratic, finance more transparent, and eliminate the possibility of single points of failure.

And is this difficult? SBF says it's hard, but not that hard. We can definitely do it, as long as there is enough demand, it will be done quickly.

SBF mentioned he was just sharing some thoughts casually, maybe it will be helpful.