25th September 2021 > > Twitter.

tl;dr

Twitter is planning on incorporating crypto payments.

Market Snap

Market Wrap

The Chinese are at it again, “banning” cryptos.

The CCC is of the firm belief that miners moving out of China is patently a good thing on two levels.

The less mining there is in China, the larger the proportion of green energy used in the mining process, helping to deflect some criticism of BTC’s energy demands.

The less influence that China has on our lives in any shape or form the better.

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But it seems that once again the CCC is out on a limb on this one. The sell-off since yesterday was triggered (in the old-fashioned and unfashionable sense of the word) by the People’s Bank of China announcing its new crackdown.

With renewed fears about Evergrande (see – China just causes problems, and we’re not even threatened by a military invasion) we should expect to see yet more evidence over the weekend of the bears leveraging up their crypto shorts ready for Monday’s open.

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By the way, if you think I am being a bit hard on China, they are not the only transgressors in the eyes of the CCC.

I am all for liberal democracies, however imperfect they may be at times.

I am always against authoritarian, dictatorial governments that restrict people’s freedom and do not allow the space for a free press or freedom of speech.

I am particularly against governments that persecute, maim and massacre large numbers of people because of their ethnicity or faith. China's treatment of the Uyghur Muslims is a prime example.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Twitter and BTC micropayments

A frequent criticism of cryptos in general, and BTC in particular, is that they are unsuited for the purpose of making small, frequent transactions.

This criticism betrays a lack of knowledge about the extent and breadth of the crypto revolution – IOTA has been created expressly for the purpose of making small, feeless transactions. The security of its network, and the speed of transactions both INCREASE as the number of transactions increase.

This criticism has some validity when applied to BTC, and ETH, but is rapidly becoming redundant with the development and application of layer two solutions. In effect, BTC is moved off the BTC blockchain and transactions happen on a separate chain with much faster processing times, and much lower fees. At some later date, the transactions that have been validated off-chain are moved back on-chain as a summary, not in the detail.

The obvious potential problem of double-spending is removed by locking up the off-chain BTC in a smart contract on-chain until it has been returned.

This concept is very similar in nature to sharding, one of the key and final elements in the creation of ETH 2.0.

For BTC, one of the more successful layer 2 solutions is called Lightning Network, which does what it says on the tin.

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Twitter have announced that they will begin to facilitate micro-payments using BTC and the Lightning Network.

This is obviously big news.

Twitter’s daily user base is over 200mm accounts, with plenty more that merely read (that’s me), or only occasionally contribute. There are only 20mm BTC wallets with more than $1 worth of BTC, but I seem to recall that one study suggested that most BTC owners had 3 to 5 wallets each on average. Personally, I have 7, but who wants to be average?

A Venn diagram of Twitter users and BTC owners would probably incorporate most of the BTC owner circle, but not much of the Twitter user circle.

Initiatives like this will further drive adoption of BTC, but perhaps more importantly, it will demonstrate that despite the popular press deriding BTC on the grounds that it cannot be used effectively or efficiently for small payments, the complete opposite is true.

Changing this negative narrative around cryptos will do everyone the world of good.