Twitter enables tipping with Bitcoin, plans to let users authenticate NFTs | Hacker News Reader

Twitter enables tipping with Bitcoin, plans to let users authenticate NFTs

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180 pointsjbegley164 comments

Absolutely incredible news.

Micropayments are one of the paths out of advertiser hell and were one of the original dreams of many crypto nerds and advocates.

I still think that twitter is pure mind cancer, but I have to give it to Jack on this. Great move, and something I hope gets repeated to the rest of the web.

For those who aren’t very familiar with the crypto space: this uses a bitcoin side chain called lightning; transactions are effectively free and instant, but still denominated in BTC.

Do we know why they're not doing it off-chain, similar to the way a crypto exchange will transfer crypto from one user to another off-chain?

Lightning network is "off-chain". Basically a network of 2-of-2 locked bitcoins called _channels_ that exchange valid Bitcoin transactions to update the balances within these channels, but only need to settle them by broadcasting them to the Bitcoin network in case of disputes.

I don’t know the specifics of this, but:

Because they don’t need to. My guess is that you just associate a lightning address with your username, and all Twitter does is present that to a wallet. This way twitter doesn’t need to do KYC, or ever hold any funds. They’re just the phone book.

I'm guessing they also don't want to. If they took custody of the Bitcoin, I believe that would make them a MSB, and hence get to do all of the "fun" associated with that. Also, the additional security and financial implications of holding money for their users.

LN doesn't have addresses, it has invoices that can't be reused.

Exactly. LN is like opening a "tab" in a bar. You ultimately settle on the chain, just like how you settle the final tab on your credit card.

LN is an unnecessary solution to a made up problem. Other cryptos have proved that much much more transactions can be easily processed by merely increasing the blocksize.

Increasing the blocksize makes running a node much more expensive (due to storage, mainly) which in turn makes the network less decentralised. Bitcoin (rightly) selects for decentralisation over transaction speed, hence LN as an L2...

Bitcoin blockchain size: 350 gb

12tb harddrive: $199.

Bitcoin blockchain is increasing at less than 100gb per year. The storage cost of 100gb is about $1.6

I'm sure people running nodes can spend more than 1.6 a year to store a bigger chain.

Thank you for doing the math.

As someone who runs a full node, this is not accurate at all. Space is cheap, bandwidth is expensive. I frequently upload > 1TB a month via my full node, if blocks were twice as big and full, then I would be uploading > 2TB a month. How many people in the world have an internet connection which can handle that? Then you have to process each block, the bigger they are, the most computation needs to be done. Everything is a trade off, Bitcoin has chosen decentralization over throughput, other chains have chosen differently.

I don't run a node but I imagine if you're conscious about bandwidth you can choose not to upload anything (or very little) and still have the opportunity to maintain an up-to-date copy of the blockchain.

In India there are MOBILE plans that allow you 2GB everyday for $2 per month! My broadband is unlimited data at 30 mbps for our $10 per month. Do quit this bullshit argument.

100 Mbps internet connections are really common nowadays. 1 TB of bandwidth in a month is really nothing. I use more than that just for Netflix and torrents.

He is talking about uploading though. Synchronous 100 Mbps connections are sadly not so common.

Ah, okay. I'll admit that it's been quite a few years since I've used lightning.

(I used it back when it was in beta to buy something from blockstream, but that was it. Back then it was an extremely complex process.)

they're doing it via lightning, which is off-chain until payment channels are settled.

But you still have to make a transaction to open a channel.

Leaving BTC and lighting aside, I don't think most people would opt out of ads in favor of micro payments. There is a minority who have the money that would but I see nothing in society that points to making such a change possible. Do you have any studies that show people would pay for news/socials/etc. in exchange for no ads/tracking/+privacy? Even the paid streaming services have ads and even when you pay, I'm sure they are still selling tracking data.

Perhaps not everybody, but this is a core business model for a lot of mobile apps. "Pay and we remove the ads". I've paid for quite a few apps just to get the ads out of the way.

Many people already have opted out of ads. People like Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi who have massive, lucrative substacks, for instance.

Many others have done patreon. Many, many youtube creators and podcasters have strong incomes due to that.

What percentage of regular people participate in these schemes though?

What percentage of regular people would participate in this new scheme, though?

Why are we considering these regular people when this is becoming the new regular?

I pay for youtube premium to avoid ads. Paying in a micro form over a lump sum form wouldnt matter for me as long as its reasonable in price and easy.

Really micro payments add-value is that most things on the internet are just not worth a visa charge or the slow fraud detection calcs on the back end. Like access to someones tweets. Its basically opening up a new economy and suitable for the metaverse in general.

Like imagine you have augmented reality glasses and are walking through a city outside a restaurant, and a digital food menu third party gives you access for 5 cents btc or eth.

Bit of a tangent here but the use case is fascinating.

I pay for Youtube and multiple podcasts on Patreon for exactly this reason. I think both ad-supported and subscription-supported are viable, and where possible creators should support both.

Twitch and similar platforms are absolutely inundated with users who are quickly growing used to regularly donating via micropayment of sorts, not even via subscription but just as one-off donations. And they hate ads. It's very common for the wealthier streamers to run the absolute minimum number of ads required by their contract. When users don't have the money to donate, they will explicitly say "give me ads" and the streamer will run them.

Isn't this what Brave tried doing in their browser circa 2016?

Doesn't seem like micropayments fit the current consumer mindset the way periodic subscriptions do.

lightning network wasn't available in 2016. Lightning network makes micro-transactions feasible with bitcoin by almost eliminating the fee.

Yes, but Brave made their own token (BAT)

Micropayments are something we’ve had available to us forever, there’s no reason a custodial wallet like PayPal can’t offer them - or couldn't have offered them at any point in the last two decades. People don’t want them. And they certainly don’t want them at up to $60 a pop haha. Or over LN which still requires an on chain transaction to open a channel.

Nick Szabo has a great write up that outlines my thoughts exactly [1]

[1] https://nakamotoinstitute.org/static/docs/micropayments-and-...

The reason that people typically don't accept tips in anything but crypto is that it would eliminate the pseudonymity that crypto would offer...

Also accepting tips via CC exposes you to chargebacks, were people can actually financially damage you (ex. they donate and chargeback, they get their money back, you get nothing + a ~$20 chargeback fee)

Also credit cards are an extraordinarily expensive way to send fifty cents.

Stripe charges 2.9% plus 30 cents per successful transaction.

So your fee on a fifty cent micropayment would be 63%.

The lightning network would be free or perhaps one sat, which would be 0.08% of a fifty cent transaction.

Nobody used micropayments when they were a hassle. Today there are already Lightning-based apps breaking down that barrier, live in production using mainnet BTC.

Spinx[0] and Zion[1] are chat apps that offer room hosts the option to set a fee for joining and/or sending messages to a channel, for the purpose of spam reduction. Another cool feature already live in the app is pay-per-minute streaming of podcasts and videos.

[0]: https://sphinx.chat/ [1]: https://www.getzion.com/

Lightning Network is not a side chain. It's basically a way to interactively update transactions between nodes before they're broadcasted and settled on blockchain. It forms a network where payments are routed through nodes without having to trust anyone. It's scalable and private.

You conveniently forgot to mention that you have to have a lightning node connected to the network 24/7 to protect yourself from fraud. Or, you have to use and trust a third party node.

Can you elaborate on this? I was under the impression that each update had to be signed. Why then would you have to be connected 24/7 to protect yourself from fraud?

A dishonest node can try to settle an outdated state of the channel on the main chain. You have 24 hours to stop that from happening. So, if your node is offline for longer than 24 hours, you could lose all the money tied up in the channel.

Everytime the balance in the channel is updated, a new transaction is created and signed. If one party in the channel publishes an old state ( which they could have more bitcoin than they should), you have to be online to detect it and publish the latest one, in which case they lose all their bitcoin for publishing an old state as punishment.

Technically you don't need to be online 24/7, just often enough to detect the fraud before the timeout, default is two weeks I think. Or you can pay someone a tiny fee to monitor the blockchain for someone publishing an old state for you.

In practice, nobody is trying to commit fraud, because : a) if you get caught you get punished severely b) most channels do not have enough BTC in them

Lightning is for small, instant, fast payments, average channel size is about 0.02 BTC.

The bigger problem is how to maintain up to date backups, and not accidentally publish an old state when recovering from a crash. We're working on it. Taproot bitcoin upgrade brings some interesting improvements we can build upon to improve things further.

EDIT: forgot to mention this is only really a problem if you want to run your own non custodial solution ( which I do). For most people, using a 3rd party custodial solution for their low balance hot wallet seems to be the norm.

> pay someone a tiny fee to monitor the blockchain

A.k.a trust a third party.

> For most people, using a 3rd party custodial solution for their low balance hot wallet seems to be the norm.

Just like Venmo or PayPal?

If you want to eliminate trust, with Bitcoin and lightning you can. If for you it's too much hassle, you don't have to. Unlike every single other blockchain, in which you have no choice but to trust centralised solutions, because they are centralised. See Solana switching their blockchain off for a while, lol [1]https://coingeek.com/solana-blockchain-implodes-what-happene...

>>If you want to eliminate trust, with Bitcoin and lightning you can. If for you it's too much hassle, you don't have to. Unlike every single other blockchain, in which you have no choice but to trust centralised solutions, because they are centralised.

*Bitcoin Cash enters the chat*

Solana bad, therefore Bitcoin good?

> A.k.a trust a third party.

True, but in a very limited sense. You're trusting a third party to protect you from your counterparty posting an out of date state. And adding further complexity, your counterparty gets punished if they get caught publishing this state, and they have no way of knowing if you are watching or not.

So, from a game theory perspective, it is unlikely for this to even come into play.

Oh, and you can technically have multiple third parties doing this.

There was recently a paper published on Inherited IDs, which proposes changes that would not only solve the on-chain scaling problem, but also eliminate the need for watchtowers: https://github.com/JohnLaw2/btc-iids/blob/main/iids13.pdf

Thanks. Where can I get materials on Lightning and its code?

People that call bitcoin "crypto" are likely to describe bitcoin technology incorrectly

This is a cynical stub of a thought if I've ever seen one. Say more?

Crypto is (was? ugh.) cryptography, for starters.

Crypto are the projects created to market themselves as decentralised bitcoin clones. They are projects controlled by a small group of insiders that run pump and dump and wash trading scams.

I'm having a very hard time imagining a scenario in which I would feel the need to tip someone for a Tweet.

I understand why I might want to pay someone for, say, a Youtube video, or a substack article. But is there really enough value packed into a tweet that I'd want to send someone money for it?

Maybe I'm just not imaginative enough. Or maybe the answer is porn.

Might be good for journalism. People get paid for their analysis and being a trusted source. Hopefully revenue drops off when lying or sloppy work occurs.

Maybe local news channels can start compensating people who's media they want to broadcast and profit from.

(1) to communicate to others that the particular tweet is valuable, by sending something with more scarcity than a mouseclick. (2) to help fund the creator of the tweet. (3) "is there really enough value packed into a tweet that I'd want to send someone money for it"? Well a tweet can be much more concise than a youtube video.

It doesn't just have to be for the content in the tweet. For example you could link to an article on your blog.

Here's an example.

Journalist spends a year on a story. Puts it on her blog. Shares the post via a tweet. You love the story, appreciate the hard work and give a tip.

"Any tips for this tweet will be sent back double!"

There’s a lot of sex work on Twitter so porn isn’t a silly answer at all.

If it made me laugh or found it insightful, I could see tipping $0.25 - $1 quite often.

How about if I give you a direct solution to your problem? How about if I open source something and you want a feature adding? All sorts of uses. I still won't use it.

Honestly I thought it was more for the chuck us a few quid tweets than rewarding anyone

Taking on GoFundMe's market rather than Patreon

I could see someone tipping people like Foone who publish content primarily as stream of consciousness style Twitter threads.

Why does Twitter need to enable anything for users to receive Bitcoin?

Couldn't the users just pin a tweet to the top of their profile "Hey, if you want to tip us, here is our Bitcoin address: ..."?

And for receiving Bitcoin via the Lighnight Network, I would expect it is similar?

Twitter will hold the bitcoins and collect interest before transfering to person tweeting?

Yes, they will enter a Defi contract for the few seconds it takes to send the lightning payment. They will scalp fractions of fractions of a cent, making them wealthier beyond their wildest dreams.

Try harder.

Well, technologically it is possible to transfer almost impossible That doesn't mean they will do it. They will hold it for a few days. At scale, it will add some money to twitter coffers(if they are successful that is)

A lot of business is just taking something that is possible and making it accessible. See: the famous Dropbox detractor comment on hacker news.

But it's just a bitcoin address. All you need to do is go to an exchange (or a wallet), click withdraw enter the public key of the other person, type in the amount and you're done.

Dropbox is also silly. It's just rsync with a UI, just spin up a command-line and transfer all your fi-... Wait a minute. This is what you meant! ;-)

I'd love to hear a version where a chef would talk about food this way or some other field that I know next to nothing about.

Edit: I didn't realize it was using the lightning network.

> But it's just a bitcoin address. All you need to do is go to an exchange (or a wallet), click withdraw enter the public key of the other person, type in the amount and you're done.

Or you could just click the button on the tweet and not do all that?

This uses the Lightning Network, which requires an invoice (unless the node has keysend payments enabled, but most end users don't run their own node). It's not the same as a Bitcoin address, and address re-use is a dirty habit anyway.

See, the problem with your methods is that Twitter's not taking a cut. They might even require a user to leave Twitter for another site! And we can't have that.

As someone who often tips people with crypto, having a button at the point where I’m consuming the content is helpful. Otherwise I have to go search for their address, or hope they have something like an ENS name as their display name so I can easily address a tip to them.

The current implementations of the lightning network don't easily allow transactions to an address (A method called keysend does exist but isn't widely used).

In order to receive a lightning payment, the receiver has to generate an invoice that anyone with a lightning wallet can pay (usually by scanning a QR code or copy/pasting the invoice). These invoices are meant to be single use.

There is a draft spec (BOLT12) that would make it easier to be able to just pin a link or QR code on a webpage or profile and receive bitcoin via the lightning network.

https://bolt12.org/

The problem with tipping online is not that people are unreasonably stingy. It's that people are reasonably lazy. A lot of people are happy to toss a few coins to their Witcher. But, it has to be trivially easy to do so or they won't bother. Requiring even trivial effort to give away money is unreasonable.

microtransactions via the Lightning network is wonderful part of the bitcoin vision. But I don't think this sentence at the bottom of the "Strike" app page is holding up to the promise: "Custody of your funds and bitcoin trading are offered through Prime Trust, LLC." [1]

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/strike-send-and-spend-bitcoin/...

Thanks for bringing this up. While the idea of blockchain payments hitting a mainstream app is kind of exciting, adding Strike support to twitter isn't much different than adding something like Venmo support. Both require a banking style intermediary that require KYC from their users.

I don't agree. This way it is a) easier to onboard _receivers_, and b) stays open in the sense that _senders_ can send bitcoins by any app they want (including non-custodial of course).

Ok, I understand (a). Regarding (b) I guess I don't fully understand their implementation, but are you suggesting that any 3rd party app could implement the payments? I guess if any app or user can pull the twitter user's lightning address one can tip then yeah I guess so. So I guess they are just using "Strike" as an officially-supported app?

>>This way it is a) easier to onboard _receivers_, and b) stays open in the sense that _senders_ can send bitcoins by any app they want (including non-custodial of course).

If I were to restate what I think you're saying: Twitter is implementing a tipping system that allows you pay using Strike _as_well_as additional non-custodial [and potentially non-kyc] lightning payment apps once a lightning channel is open.

I think that you're either dead wrong, or the non-Strike lightning payment option will be so convoluted that almost no one actually will actually use it. I will be happy to be proven wrong though.

Would love to see more of this stuff done with privacy coins instead.

Time to double down on Twitter alternatives. I feel immensely conflicted about using a platform that supports multi-level marketing pyramid Ponzi schemes.

Could you elaborate on what you mean here? How is Bitcoin multi-level marketing or a ponzi scheme?

“Thirdly, early adopters mine or buy large proportions of the total supply at negligible costs while late adopters mine or buy negligible proportions at large costs. It follows that holders immediately have every incentive to get as many people to buy after them. Like stocks? Like stocks, but without the dividends or anything tangible in the real world. Congratulations, you got yourself a pyramid scheme.” — https://www.cynicusrex.com/file/cryptocultscience.html

This podcast, after the first half, really goes into depth why all contemporary crypto“currencies” are inherently flawed: https://anchor.fm/when-the-music-stops/episodes/Nano--Digita....

Another good article: https://defector.com/cryptocurrency-bad-and-weird/.

Most stocks do not pay dividends. If you do some research you will find that Bitcoin pays interest at rates higher than most dividend stocks.

By your definition real estate, stocks and precious metals are also multi-level marketing since early insiders profit at the expense of late-comers.

Also Bitcoin has something like 70 million users so less than 1% adoption. In other words everyone is still early.

I’ll read those links but please note when I refer to Bitcoin, I am excluding all other crypto.

Bitcoin truly is a special snowflake and if you don’t understand the difference between Bitcoin and Altcoins I would suggest doing some more research to understand what you may have missed.

When people talk about historical Bitcoin returns being attractive, they are talking about an extremely short history full of incredible variance and an uncertain legal future. You can’t easily make long term predictions based on that

11 years is extremely short? As for variance, yes sure over the short term but Bitcoin has 10x’d every other traditional investment on a long-term basis. You make long-term predictions based on things like scarcity, automated inflation policy, and other anti-inflationary properties.

Based on its historical investment returns as well as its inherent properties, I would argue that at this point a zero percent allocation into Bitcoin is objectively the wrong value.

Lightning network theoretically makes micropayments possible, and that should be celebrated for enabling new ways of online monetization that the tech world writ large can explore.

Imagine if you could buy access to a paywalled news article for $0.02 (on an article-by-article basis) instead of having to purchase a monthly subscription. Or imagine being able to pay $0.10 to watch a particular episode of a show without needing to subscribe to the streaming service. How many people would prefer doing that instead of using current SaaS subscription models (which exist largely because it's a huge hassle to implement credit card-based micropayments)?

Subscription businesses should be on guard: micropayments open up advertising-independent ways for creators to monetize content. With all the well-deserved criticism of ad-based businesses in recent years (particularly social media), it's possible that micropayments enable business models that don't rely on ads the way many online businesses have up to this point. That's huge, and kudos to Twitter for taking the leap.

I also think if we remove advertising from existence another plus for the society would be getting rid of "articles" about "look this dog how much barks when he sees the postman", maybe some would pay for that, but I think having micropayments to access content would force the content to be meaningful

what does bitcoin really enable here that normal payment systems don't

Well you can't really tip with a payment system, realistically, right? If I want to toss someone 50 cents Visa or whoever takes a fixed amount plus a percentage, so there are usually minimums.

stuff like the lightning network has similar fees right? I can see the benefit for the smaller scale of tips though

Lightning transfers cost 1 sat, about 0.05 cents. So on a 50 cent transaction that's 0.1% fee.

Saying "we have a crypto strategy" to both investors and the board

I don't use twitter but maybe now I have a reason to, and I'm not particularly pro-crypto (I hold maybe $8 worth of bitcoin)

I use Twitter and it has the opposite effect. I’m not surprised though.

Sounds like initial plans are to not take a fee for Bitcoin payments. Which is awesome but a bit surprising.

I wonder whether they'll be able to keep this fee-less over the longer term. If/when they start facilitating billions of dollars moving per year, I'd imagine intense pressure from shareholders to take a cut.

How would they take a cut?

They're using the 2nd layer lightning network, fees are not an issue.

They can profit simply by holding bitcoin, which they're increasing demand for.

Bitcoin has always been the kind of thing that rewards insiders.

Companies and government officials can profit just by holding bitcoin and then incentivizing its wider use. It makes more sense to become an insider than to fight bitcoin. Arguably, that's even true for major financial institutions.

Will Twitter offer APIs to do things like allow a user to authenticate to allow an app or service to track tips they receive? I haven't seen any information about this.

> Bitcoin isn't the extent of Twitter’s crypto plans: the company said it is also planning to support authentication for NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, by letting people connect their crypto wallets. “NFT authentication will come in the form of a badge, shown on profile pictures, marking the owner’s NFT as authentic,” a company spokesperson said.

No talk about the NFTs yet. My gut tells me that ultimately, personally speaking, NFTs are going to be about telling me what I can't do. "You can't post that meme, you can't quote that person, etc." Maybe I just don't get it?

I wonder how much of this will be used for tipping thirst traps

Who are Strike's competitors?

This (this specific news as well as crypto in general) still feels like externalizing a fairly important cost - the energy usage required to keep this world-wide distributed ledger going.

Change my mind?

Bitcoin's energy consumption depends on mining revenue. Currently the main component of mining revenue is block reward. Block reward will go to zero over time. How much energy Bitcoin will use then is not known today. It is a new experiment that mankind is performing for the first time.

The old financial system is not very efficient. In the USA alone, millions of people work in the finance sector. Automating those tasks via crypto systems might save a lot of energy.

There is a good chance that Bitcoin's energy usage will be completely solar based in the long run.

The bits of the old financial system which duplicate bitcoin (doing simply electronic transactions) are very efficient.

I see no reason all the other stuff wouldn't still be around in a world where bitcoin replaced the dollar.

Also, there is no way bitcoin can come close to scaling to even a tiny fraction of the transactions which happen every day.

Bitcoin does not only do transactions. It has a smart contract language which allows more and more types of smart contracts all the time. (Yes, Bitcoin is not static as many people think).

The old system is not at all efficient for transactions. Vendors hate credit cards for a reason. Visa alone made 20 Billion Dollars in revenue last year for a reason.

Bitcoin can scale infinitely via the Lightning Network.

Visa is "inefficient" because they supply many many more services than simply transacting. Dispute resolution, fraud detection, customer service, card issuing, and on and on. You know, all of this stuff we'll have to build from scratch for Bitcoin to become even remotely viable as a currency. There's no reason to believe that Bitcoin can make these services any more efficient.

Dispute resolution:

This "service" has pros and cons. It is one reason why vendors hate credit cards. You never know when you can be sure that the payment really was done. Or if it will suddenly disappear again.

Fraud detection:

One reason why fraud detection is needed is that the whole system of "whoever has the number can pull money" is insane.

Customer service:

What do you mean?

Card issuing:

Who wants cards? Those will go away anyhow.

Dispute resolution is trivial with a 2-of-3 multisig. The customer locks up funds until service has been provided and then in the ideal case the customer and merchant agree and pay the merchant. If there's a dispute, the dispute resolver can forcibly send funds with the cooperation of either party.

The bit of dispute resolution where the money is sent isn't the hard bit -- it's actually doing the resolution. Bitcoin doesn't help with that at all.

> Bitcoin can scale infinitely via the Lightning Network

No it can't . It barely scales to the orbit of Pluto (~5.7 light hours from the sun). You can not use it to send Bitcoin from one random point in the Oort cloud to another.

> The bits of the old financial system which duplicate bitcoin (doing simply electronic transactions) are very efficient.

Its all very efficient until Mastercard and Visa decide that your line of business should not be allowed to receive money and they blacklist you and your descendants from the financial system forever.

When you say over time are we talking next year, decade, century?

I don't really follow Bitcoin and friends, all I know is it uses more electric than some countries

You can find the schedule by googling "bitcoin halving schedule".

The current plan is to halve the block reward every 4 years and completely stop paying a block reward in 2140.

2140 haha. I included century as an exaggerated joke answer to try to poke someone into responding, I didn't realise it was on the money

Talk about beating a dead horse. Read literally any HN thread ever posted about cryptocurrencies to see this discussed ad nauseum.

There are many ways to re-internalize the costs of CO2-producing energy use, such as putting a carbon tax on energy providers which emit CO2.

In contrast, writing specific policies to target (specific uses of) specific cryptocurrencies, without exempting the renewable energy used in their production, and without targeting other "frivolous" uses of energy, would be an inelegant approach.

Honestly, the main argument is "I don't care about following your priorities for 'legitimate' energy usage and you can't stop me."

This uses the lightning network. The energy cost of a lightning payment is orders of magnitude lower than bitcoin.

This kind of usage actually demonstrates bitcoin's valuable use case (a base layer for final settlement) whereas in recent years a lot of energy was being burned effectively just for speculation.

price the energy cost correctly then

Anyone else not really suprised. It's like they were actively in search of sharks to jump over for years. The question we should be asking is, what's next or why? I think this is for Only Fans uber-for-porn competition.

If only a massive corporation could think beyond their wallet which may people put next to their second favourite organs!

Plenty of people tip creators on YouTube (SuperChats) and Patreon for things that have nothing to do with porn or sex at all.

onlyfans for SFW stuff actually sounds a much better way to monetize twitter. There's a reason why onlyfans looks like a twitter feed. Might even possibly help them to change their perception of being politically onesided

I'm sure Jack Dorsey selling an NTF of the first tweet ever had nothing to do with this plan.

BitClout already does this although there's a lot of speculation that BitClout will fail where as Twitter has lasted for a decent amount of time.

> Strike works in all US states except New York and Hawaii, and the country of El Salvador.

That's odd, because Strike is the company on which El Salvador's Bitcoin experiment is based.

https://www.businessofbusiness.com/articles/what-is-strike-E...

Also, this article has a completely different take:

> A video was released on Thursday of Jack Mallers demonstrating the service with the firm’s integration of the Strike API. In the video Mallers sent Bitcoin from Chicago to El Salvador via Twitter.

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/jack-dorsey-twitter-roll...

What am I missing?

Confusing sentence. It could be rewritten as

"Strike works in El Salvador and all US states except New York and Hawaii"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com