Lots of talk about Elon waving his magic wand and granting a decentralized Twitter with lightning payments. A few thoughts…
No way in fresh hell he’d pay $44 billion for a publicly-traded software platform and decentralize/demonetize it.
Let’s say he enables and promotes lightning in the near term. Most likely it would be limited to a tightly surveilled integration with an app like Strike or CashApp. Not ideal, but it does drive some adoption. It would be interesting to know what he thinks of the seemingly lackluster tipping test-run with Strike.
He’s also not shown to have any real interest in the lightning network. He has a love/hate relationship with Bitcoin and its community, and seems just as willing to integrate Doge payments as he is Bitcoin payments.
Another downside is that whatever adoption lightning payments creates and enables, the network would be in more of a prime-time FUD spotlight (more of Liz Warren & Jamie Dimon squawking that — only drug dealers and terrorists use the network.) All that, along with “Twitter Payments™” being “Elon’s project” and all the political baggage that comes with it.
The alternative? A sly and roundabout way that scales slowly but steadily over time. One that doesn’t bulldoze the legacy system overnight, but slowly erodes from without and within. After all, isn’t this how all truly revolutionary protocols scale?
#Nostr
