 It's kind of also a bad match for Twitter to want to do it, but they've done it anyways. And that says to me again that they're trying to signal something, whether to us or to the mainstream government or just the normal people, or I don't know who they're signaling to. But it does feel like there's a motive that goes beyond just, hey, why don't we turn on Bitcoin tipping? The early days of Bitcoin startups was full of what we used to call bridging services. Basically, these companies were shortcuts that made Bitcoin useful in places where larger companies like Amazon or Twitter that you would want to spend something like Bitcoin really had no interest in making them useful. It was just too early. These services weren't perfect, but they were very popular and they spurred a lot of early use, helping power the initial waves of adoption that we've seen grow with time. Last week, Twitter announced that it was officially integrating Bitcoin lightning payments for some users and Bitcoin addresses within your Twitter profile for everyone, although I was not actually able to find that in my profile. This episode is part history about the early days of tipping and the transactional ecosystem, which I would really characterize as probably the 2012 through 2015 period, and part discussion of the implications of Twitter's move. So with all that said, my name is Adam B. Levine, and this is Speaking of Bitcoin. As always, I'm joined by the other host of the show, Stephanie Murphy. Hi. And Jonathan Mohan. Hey, hey. Andreas is out this week. So Twitter is just one company, but this is actually a pretty big deal. Before we get into the specifics of what Twitter is doing, let's just take a moment to celebrate the fact that Bitcoin tipping appears to be on the verge of coming back in vogue, and it's been a long time coming. The lightning network has long promised to bring kind of transactional ease of the kinds that you see with non-Bitcoin systems. It's funny to think about alternative cryptocurrencies as non-Bitcoin systems. One, of course, we're talking about this really, not just in comparison to other cryptocurrencies, but in comparison to the broader financial system, where the reason why you can't do microtransactions is because there are flat fees that basically make it so that in percentage terms, sending a dollar to somebody has best case scenario, a 30% transaction fee associated with it, just from the kind of minimums on card payments and stuff like that. But again, early on in the Bitcoin life cycle and early on in the life cycle of this show, tipping was really, really, really important. The first talk that I ever gave at a cryptocurrency conference was in the spring of 2013, right after we had started the show, and that talk was entitled, YouTube is broken, how Bitcoin tipping is going to change everything or something like that. I don't exactly remember what it was called. But it was like a big deal and it powered the show for the first couple of years. And then as time went on, it kind of started to fade out. So let's kind of talk about that for a second. Stephanie, what was the first kind of instance that you saw of Bitcoin tipping and what was kind of your read of the early ecosystem? Oh, well, my first experience with Bitcoin tipping was actually my first experience with Bitcoin. I received my first Bitcoin ever when someone sent me a tip. And it was because I was on a radio show where we were talking about Bitcoin and the person was excited and they sent me some Bitcoin. And I'm very grateful for that. And it felt really good. It was like, wow, someone just recognized me. And then this thing just popped up and I had to create a wallet before that. But I was sort of creating a wallet and putting it out there that I would like to receive some. And I did. And it felt really good. So yeah, tipping was really important to me. And that was before we even started the show. So I think maybe it was even 2012 or something like that. This was like real early days. And at that time, the people that I knew from my career in radio were tipping each other without the need for these bridging services. They were just literally creating an address, pasting it somewhere in their social media or whatever, and sending each other Bitcoin. And some people even made these vanity addresses. So you knew it was theirs or something. And that's bad practice to reuse an address. But it was something that some people like to do. So yeah, I think that this is popular because it feels so good. And this also reminds me of Doge in the beginning of Doge. They were really building a community and promoting their coin by making it about tipping and about giving to charity. And it also didn't hurt that they had the cute dog and everything in the language and that kind of thing. But tipping is great marketing because you spread it to one person and then they get excited about it because it feels so good. And then they spread it to other people. I was immediately starting to tip other people. And it wasn't really passing money around in a circle because it was like, I was telling people, okay, if you make a wallet, I'll send you a little bit of Bitcoin to get started. And I did that with people for years after that just to kind of spread the word about Bitcoin. And who knows how many people that reached now 10 years later or something, right? I think you're totally right on there as far as like, it just feels good to tip. It feels good to tip and it feels good to receive a tip. Yeah, exactly. Just the easy carefree nature of it. I really think adds a lot. Now to Dogecoin for a second, tipping was part of Dogecoin's culture and it was part of early Bitcoin culture too. And it was part of these things because it didn't really matter, right? Like at the time that we were doing a lot of this stuff, nobody really was here because of the money. And especially for Dogecoin, like Bitcoin, you saw the price start to go up to $1,000, right? And that was like a lot of money. And then suddenly it was a little bit more about the money. But Dogecoin, that didn't really happen till this year. But even when Bitcoin was running up to, I think the first one was like 130 and then it was 450 and then it was 1,000. During those run-ups, people were still tipping. Like I remember our show was getting tips. I was getting tips. They were still tipping. They were just instead of sending a whole Bitcoin or half a Bitcoin like they did when it was worth $6, they were sending 0.1 or 0.01 or something like that. And they were still doing it even though the value changed, but just it was a different increment. Yeah, it was a really different way of thinking about it at the time too. Because again, I think the part where tipping started to get into trouble. So there's capacity stuff, which pushed up fees. But I don't really think that that's the reason why tipping kind of dropped off in some of these cultures for a number of years. I think a lot of what it was, at least from what I can tell, is kind of people looking at tips that they had given in the past. And you're right. When the price was going up, people would tip because they would feel like they had effectively found money, yeah, that makes you feel generous when you feel like you have an abundance. You're like, okay, I'm going to give some of this away and this cost me whatever. I got it for free or I paid 10 bucks for it. Now it's worth 100 bucks. Hey, I can share some of that with someone else. And also it's a win-win because it's like this whole thing about the pizza, the guy that bought the Bitcoin pizza. Bitcoin had no value before that because nobody knew what it was worth. And he spent, what was it, 50,000 bitcoins or something on getting a pizza delivered? 10,000, but yeah. Oh, 10,000, yeah. And everybody looks at that and says, oh, what a scur, he gave away so many Bitcoin. But no, he was actually ensuring that Bitcoin had value to build off of in the future by starting to use it. And I think that the people who were there in the beginning got that, that if you give it away, you actually show more people how cool it is and then they start using it. And then it actually lifts up the value in the long run over time for you and for everybody else. I think that's definitely the theory. I think that personally for myself, and again, what we noticed with the show was that it wasn't really transaction fees that went up significantly that caused people to start rethinking their tipping strategy. Because again, you have to think about it over a short period of time, medium period of time, and a longer term period of time, right? Over a short period of time, tipping makes a lot of sense for all the reasons we've been talking about. Feels really good. You're like, hey, free money, right? Like I've just come into a windfall. I can be generous. This is awesome. And lots of people do and lots of people did. But then as the price continues to go up and you see it go from, oh, well, here's that tip I made at $500 and it cost me this much. And man, I feel good about that because of this other money I have. As the price continues to go up and up and up and up and up, I think that a lot of people just like looked back at that stuff and were like, okay, that felt good. But in hindsight, probably it was not a great choice. And so I don't actually kind of peg the end of kind of the pervasive tipping culture that we saw at one point to fees or anything like that. I peg it to the continued rapid appreciation of cryptocurrency broadly and Bitcoin specifically in terms of prices and just kind of what that did to people psychologically in terms of what's the best way for me to behave in this type of a situation. So that's interesting because it sounds like you're saying that you think people were regretting the tips that they gave. And I have a different perspective on it. I don't think that people were regretting it. I just think maybe that they saw the rising, appreciating price value of a sign that their evangelism had worked and that it's time to go to a different phase now. Okay, lots of people know about this. Now we can change our efforts to do something else. We're going to talk more about what Twitter is specifically doing after the break. But one of the things I think that's really different about this time around versus last time around is that this official level of support is just something that wasn't there in any prior incarnation. You can take a look back and like, I think that we actually created the first tip widget, which is what we called it. Yes, did you create that or did you kind of commission it? I commissioned it. I found somebody on Reddit, which is where I found everybody in the early days. And I was like, hey, we want to be able to embed a button that allows people to click it and then to pull up the address for that particular episode because we created a different tip address for each episode. And then to be able to see how many tips had been received numerically, to see how much total value in terms of Bitcoin and in terms of US dollar equivalent had been received. And it was just this kind of really cool thing. So that worked really well. We powered the show off of that for the first basically year and were able to send ourselves to conferences and buy some equipment. And it was really actually quite successful. On the other side of it, I remember I wrote an article for TechCrunch, first and only article I ever wrote for TechCrunch. In 2014, 2015, I can't remember when it was, probably 2014, it was about kind of using tokens as a means to crowdfund where you solve some of the problems that are inherent in crowdfunding by giving people a token rather than just a promise that says that I'm going to give you this or that and said it's a token that it can be redeemable for that. And so as part of that, I asked and was allowed to include that tip widget within the article. And they had paid me, I think, $100 or maybe $200 for the article. I was just working for them as a freelancer on this one-off situation. And the article went live and pretty much immediately I received somewhere in the range of $400 or $500 worth of tips. And I was like, wow, that was really successful. I'm going to put this in every article I do from now on. And an editor at TechCrunch who had not been involved with the process to that point noticed that this thing was there and they're like, what the hell is this? So that was the last time I worked with TechCrunch and they didn't pull the article but they did pull the tip widget out of it and we're just very unhappy about that because it kind of changes the power dynamic in terms of like, who is actually paying you? Is it the publication that you're writing for that's paying you? Or is it the people who are tipping you that are paying you? And there were concerns that the appearance was that I was being rewarded by people for advocating this particular point of view. And so I thought that was very interesting as well. That is interesting because now, we've seen absolutely an explosion in this whole subscriber financed content kind of thing where people are creating content, videos, articles, all kinds of stuff. And then they're getting subscribers on, first it started out with Patreon, I guess, but now there's Substack and there's all these other ones and in YouTube, of course, was one of the other early ones, you know, where people were getting sponsored by the people who actually consumed their content directly instead of getting advertisers and stuff. I also think the TechCrunch journalists were correct that no one should ever reward a editor or a journalist or an op-ed column for a particular point of view that resonates with them. I think the thought of people following people on the basis of appreciating their viewpoint is anathema to good journalism and should be avoided at all costs. Thank you for that, Jonathan. So do you support people that you disagree with, Jonathan? No, it's not literally what writing for a publication is and then you get your column, and a column is literally the acknowledgement that you generate enough interest with your particular point of view that your users are financially rewarding you by listening to your advertisements. I don't understand what their conflict was. I just think they were Luddites about it. Well, it's a gatekeeper question, right? Sure. So the Luddite part of it, like I totally agree with you there, like this was super new, right? And like I had been working with an editor there, but I wasn't working with like the managing editor or like the editor who was in charge of that editor's boss, right? It seemed like that's what happened is that, you know, like I snuck it through by working with an editor who was just like, hey, this sounds cool, let's do it. And then as it got to the higher ups, it became a little bit problematic. But I mean, I think that it really does come down to power dynamics though, right? Which is that like, if you are being paid directly by the audience, then that presents the conflict that they want to avoid because it means that you're not really working for them. And I wasn't. I mean, I didn't really feel like I was. I felt like I was writing this thing that I was going to write either way. And it would be really cool to put it in TechCrunch because I really like TechCrunch. But ultimately, by putting the tip widget in there, I was making it so that people could just kind of pay me directly. So anyways, so tipping is really kind of this interesting nuanced thing that's part like social signaling and also part like allowing for kind of direct incentivization of the things that you want in a way that's much more tangible than traditionally we've had in the world of journalism or really most parts of the world, for that matter, and kind of allowing this direct connection. And that's the part that's always been so cool about it is that, you know, Bitcoin is a system that works like the internet, but it is a separate system from the internet. And so it allows you to do these things in a direct way that you really couldn't do with just kind of traditional infrastructure. That reminds me of WikiLeaks, you know, that was the classic prototypical example of if you want to support them, but you couldn't do it with the traditional credit card processors or PayPal because they cut them off. And so, yeah, that's user-supported content right there. Adam, I have a couple of questions for you. One is, you know, before you had to take down this tip widget, do you remember if you made more money in tips or from the pay that you got for writing this article? Yeah, I distinctly remember that. It was almost immediately more money from tips. Ah, that's very interesting. That's what I think the problem was. I think they saw that and they were like, okay, this is weird. Let's just pull it. Yeah, but good for you because you found the way to make money doing this, which is what incentivizes people to keep creating content. So, I mean, good for you. Again, like, I found a way to do it for better or worse. I'm just crazy experimental about all of the stuff that I do. And so I have a tendency to bring that into whatever organization I'm working with on any given project. And again, it just wasn't that great a fit for TechCrunch. But I did feel like it was a success, even with that. I agree. I think you were punished for innovating. But anyway, and the second question is, why did you say that YouTube is broken? I like the headline there, but, you know, I want you to pay the tease. Like, what was the thesis of your talk that you were talking about? Oh man, it's been so long and so much has changed. One of the things that came out of one of the very early conferences that we attended, I believe it was that first one that we all spoke at in San Jose in 2013, spring of, was this couple who went there and filmed basically the entire thing. And we encouraged them to, first off, to put up the videos as quickly as possible, which they took a decently long time to do. And secondly, to embed a Bitcoin address into each of the videos in the form of a QR code. And the idea was is that they were moving really slowly on it because they frankly didn't have any money and they were just kind of trying to grind through it themselves. And you go to a conference and, you know, like a conference, you know, that has multiple stages, you know, that goes on for a couple of days, like there's a lot of content that comes out of that. And so what we encouraged them to do was to put this tip address on. I looked at that tip address maybe six months ago, and they wound up receiving a whole bunch of Bitcoin, you know, and at the time, the Bitcoin was not worth that much, but they received like a lot. And just insofar as like doing work that was ostensibly free, but which people found valuable, that method allowed them to collect a lot more money than they would have been able to collect relative to the number of plays that they had. And that was basically my thesis is that if we're involving YouTube, if we're involving sponsors and advertisers and all of these other things, then there's a lot of people in there who are either going to try to spend as little money as possible or are going to take a fairly large portion of the money in terms of YouTube. And so the amount of money that you can earn from something that's important, but important to a smaller group of people, especially which was true in the early days of Bitcoin, that was just such a better multiplier on taking even very, very small tips. And then the other thing that I did is I believe I projected out the price increases. And I don't even remember what my base assumption was, but basically you could have a very modest rate of increase on the value of the tips that you get and those tips could become incredibly valuable. And that was something that we repeated over and over again during the early days. Now, the part of our strategy that wasn't quite so great is that we wound up spending almost all of the Bitcoin that we actually pulled in both from sponsors and from tips by nature of the purpose of having Bitcoin was to then spend the Bitcoin as Bitcoin to further create the initial Bitcoin economy. When this whole idea that Bitcoin is money was the dominant narrative in the space for a good long time. As time went on, that narrative has gone away and it's less Bitcoin is money and it's more Bitcoin is gold now. But again, I think that the next part of this that we're going to talk about is going to kind of bring some of that back around as the lightning network comes up. A lot of the things that have been friction-y they kind of start to go away. Now, you still have all the tax implications. There's still lots of complexity about it so it doesn't solve any of that. But after the break, we'll be back and we'll talk about what's going on with Twitter and how we may be seeing the start of new renaissance when it comes to Bitcoin tipping. Hey, listeners. This episode of Speaking of Bitcoin is brought to you in part by ezdns.com. EasyDNS and its CEO, Mark Jeftavik, have been a friend of the show since virtually the beginning and are the sponsors of more episodes than anyone. Just like us, their interest isn't in making money. It's about helping grow these revolutionary ideas, offering more and better choices to real people while empowering free very much legal speech even as that's become increasingly unpopular. They offer domain registration, DNS and email backend service along with anything else you might need to manage your little part of the internet. They've provided services too and stood up for outfits like WikiLeaks even in moments when that was most difficult and have been extremely responsive whenever we've run into problems of our own as, of course, we use them too. Typically, sponsorships of this show are just that. Sponsorships, not endorsements. But in the case of ezdns, I am willing to put my personal reputation on the line unsolicited and strongly suggest that if you're looking for more from your DNS provider, I strongly recommend ezdns.com. So check them out and you can use the coupon code SpeakingOfBTC, that's all one word speaking of BTC, to get 50% off your initial purchase. That's ezdns.com and thank you very much for listening. So on Thursday, September 23rd, Esther Crawford posted to the Twitter blog about bringing tips to everyone. I'm just going to read briefly from this. Good news, our tipping feature now called Tips is rolling out to everyone with more payment options to choose from, even crypto. And basically, this is not something that everyone can turn on as far as being able to accept money, but anybody can actually do the tips basically you see like a little icon next to a person's name who has turned them on. I actually went looking for people who had turned them on and it's possible I just picked all the wrong people, but I could not figure out how to turn them on myself. The only person who I found was Jack Mahler's LoveStrike. He has the payment thing activated on his, but again, I looked at three or four other accounts and couldn't really find anything. So it's rolled out in some capacities, but it still isn't really widely used as far as we can tell. Now it's just been a couple of days so this could change, but that's kind of what's going on. So the whole thing here broadly is that once this is fully rolled out, then you will be able to use the Lightning Network and other forms of money too, but the Lightning Network natively to be able to send tips from one person to another person. This relies primarily on the Strike Wallet from what I can tell, which is Jack Mahler's wallet, primarily powered around Lightning, although it has a lot of kind of like a new user onboarding features to make it so you don't necessarily have to have Bitcoin in order to jump directly into Lightning. But that's kind of what the feature is in a nutshell. It sounds like you can take the Bitcoin off of the platform, which is great. It's better than PayPal, right? With their integration. That's really interesting and cool. I think the part about it that's particularly interesting to me is that this is the closing of a loop that we kind of saw open many, many years ago in the very kind of early days. There was a company called Change Tip that basically was one of these bridge services that I talked about in the opening and they created a solution that allowed you to call up like a Twitter bot. I mean, that Twitter bot would then maintain your balance of Bitcoin. It was actually like a hot wallet, right? So it was actually keeping Bitcoin held on behalf of other people. You can kind of think about it like an exchange, except instead of exchanging it for money, you would just say, hey, send it to this person and it would reallocate the Bitcoin within this kind of giant shared wallet. Yes. And you could buy someone a hamburger, a beer, a coffee. You know, it was cute things like that. And it would tweet out, the Change Tip bot tweets, Stephanie just bought Adam a hamburger and sent 0.2 Bitcoin, because that's probably what it was at the time, right? And then if you wanted to collect your Bitcoin, you could go to the Change Tip website and you could somehow, I guess, log in with Twitter and then you could take it out or you could just, you know, retweet it to other people. You could use the tips that you received to tip other people and pass money around in a circle. That was actually, I think, ultimately, the biggest problem with Change Tip was that after a certain point, they weren't growing anymore. People were criticizing it for being more like passing money around in a circle and how kind of difficult it was sometimes to get the money out of the platform. And there were some very impressive tips that went through some people tipped. I remember like thousands of dollars. Some people got tips or hundreds of dollars and this is back when Bitcoin was $100. So we're talking about like one to five, 10 Bitcoin donations that people are making to other people on Reddit. It was really impressive. The guy that started it is Nick Sullivan. Actually, there's an entrepreneur magazine article that came out about him, I think, this week specifically about his time at Change Tip. He's a really nice guy and I think the thing that killed it, most of all, well, the thing that killed it was Airbnb. But the thing that killed it was the March 13th guidance that said that everything in this space was money transmission. Change Tip most certainly wasn't a money transmitter license in all 47 states that require licenses. But also, I think it actually died an aqua hire death because I think it was Airbnb bought the whole company just to acquire some of the engineers and then they just mothballed the product. Yeah, I mean, that was a little disappointing. What I remember was that I received some Change Tips and then I was trying to get them out and I couldn't at the point. And that is the underlying problem with this, right? Is that what Twitter today is using the lightning network to do, which basically means that you as the individual who is holding some Bitcoin in your lightning wallet, that you are custodying your lightning. And when you send it to somebody else on Twitter, they are then custodying the Bitcoin, right? So it really is using the Bitcoin infrastructure that is then integrated into Twitter in some ways in order to make it so that Twitter is never actually involved with the transaction at all. They're just helping guide you to pay for Alice to pay Bob, so to speak. And that was not true of Change Tip. You know that old, the Matrix meme where it's like how many dollars is a Bitcoin? And then it's Morpheus saying, no, Neo, I'm telling you that at the time when Bitcoin succeeds, you won't even ask that question, right? Which is like once that coin succeeds, you don't even care how many dollars you get for it because everything's in Bitcoin. I kind of feel like the success of Bitcoin is that where it's like we just come to a point where it's like by the time Twitter integrates tipping people in Bitcoin, I just genuinely don't even care and don't even think it matters. Well, it doesn't matter to you, but I think it does matter to kind of the broader narrative that's happening here, which is the increasing normalization of this stuff. But does it though? Because Twitter is a giant piece of s***. It's like the worst attributes of PayPal, but even more bigoted. And so it's like any of the innovation or thought or interests in tipping or anything that was challenging the status quo that Bitcoin can achieve will be entirely mitigated by the fact that it's on Twitter, using Twitter of all places. I mean, good God, you think Visa stops you because they don't like what you're doing. Like the most disgusting thing PayPal has ever done, pales to how Twitter will un-tank people from their platform. Yeah. And let's not forget, it only took them eight years to do this, right? I think it's great that it's happening. I just don't think it's going to achieve anything of merit other than, I guess, teach people that Bitcoin's better than what they thought it was. It's sort of like the boomers that think, well, if the government says it's okay, then it's okay. Like I think it's great that another legacy institution is saying Bitcoin's okay, not because I want people to engage with a legacy institution. It's just the laggards who look at them and decide that they want to participate once they say that they want to get involved. So I care far less about Twitter's ability to admit Bitcoin and far more that laggards look to Twitter and say, oh, well, now that Twitter supports it, maybe I can get my toe into this Bitcoin thing. I have a question about this new Twitter feature. Does it make it public when you tip someone? Like, does it send out a tweet? Or is it just kind of happening behind the scenes privately? Or can you choose to share it? Like I said, I couldn't figure out how to actually activate this on my own account. So it's possible that I'm being an idiot, but I don't believe that it does alert anybody when it does this. I think that it's just, you're just sending a transaction. And actually by nature of it being a lightning transaction, it's not even public in the same way like a Bitcoin main chain transaction would be where it would actually go on to the blockchain instead it's this private thing until it's settled. Well, then this actually seems quite different in a fundamental important way from ChangeTip then because ChangeTip makes me think of, there's a principle in some religions where if you give to charity, you shouldn't talk about it. You should always do it anonymously because if you brag about it, you're essentially getting credit and you're getting a benefit and it's not true altruism, right? And so, ChangeTip was that it was letting everyone know I gave a tip, I gave a donation, I'm generous and I have Bitcoin, right? And if this is actually private and it's even more private because the transaction takes place on the lightning network, then that adds just a layer of privacy that I think maybe changes some of the incentives and also makes it different than ChangeTip in a really important way. I guess the question that I would have is, is that good or bad? Well, it depends on who you are and what you're using it for. I mean, I think in the beginning, when ChangeTip was being used to spread the word about Bitcoin and how the joy of giving a Christmas present or receiving one, then it was great to tweet about it because it lets everybody know, hey, you're a Bitcoin person and you like to spread the word. And it also provides more transparency, I guess, in a way like, hey, this person received a lot of tips, I guess, and you may like that or you may not. I think a big thing that it did as far as the kind of public nature of it is a lot of what ChangeTip was doing was trying to bring in new people to the kind of community, right, to people who are interested in Bitcoin. And I don't get the vibe that that's what's happening here. I get the vibe that it's a recognition that people consider it valuable. And by nature of considering it valuable, there is some advantage then to Twitter implementing it. Now, I also think that there's a pretty good amount of just like social signaling here that's happening with this Twitter move in general. As you said, they're not doing it as a way to support the community. They're doing it because for a long time, Twitter has correctly or not been perceived and been portrayed by Jack as a company that is going to participate in this. They're not doing what Facebook's doing and trying to start their own stablecoin or something like that. They're just saying, hey, this is a thing. It appears that is going to be important in the future and we want to be part of that. And that's also interesting to me. So I kind of feel like this is a relatively low-lift thing for them to do. It really requires nothing from them outside of some front-end development and a couple of integrations of APIs or something like that. So it's pretty straightforward as far as a task goes, but it sends a big message. And that message is that we're not doing what Facebook did. We are fast movers in this stuff. And again, not fast compared to us or the people who we typically care about, but compared to companies of this size in relative importance to culture, it actually is still a pretty early mover. I remember for a long time we were like, hey, when is Amazon going to accept this stuff? And it was always kind of a bad match for Amazon to want to accept a form of currency like this. It's kind of also a bad match for Twitter to want to do it, but they've done it anyways. And that says to me again that they're trying to signal something, whether to us or to the mainstream government or just the normal people or I don't know who they're signaling to, but it does feel like there's a motive that goes beyond just, hey, why don't we turn on Bitcoin tipping? Maybe it's tracking people or gathering some kind of data from it. I mean, that's the motivation of social media companies for everything else is just gathering data on their users and selling it or whatever. Yeah, that's totally plausible. So I would assume that that's going on. So I mean, where does this fit into kind of the broader narrative of things? Because I think I've already played my cards on the table is to me, this is just like all the central bank digital currency stuff. It's just like the corporations starting to look at the stuff as a treasury asset is I really see this as a continued process of normalizing what cryptocurrency is and what role does it play in modern life? When we got started with this, it was about libertarians and people who wanted to buy drugs on the internet, basically. And now we've gotten to the point where pretty major companies are not just using it as treasury but are actually starting to build it into their products. PayPal also a big deal for the same reason, not because PayPal is a great company, but because PayPal is a huge company. And by nature of even putting in a crippled implementation of this stuff, they necessarily make it more normal in a way that you really couldn't imagine without that type of corporate adoption, even if it does have all these ulterior motives and other things that go around it. So is my read right on this or do you see kind of more of a negative twist as we get more of this adoption? Are we deluding or are we becoming normal? And is that good or bad? I have a question for you guys. Maybe you can answer this better or maybe we should ask Andreas, but since I don't use Twitter, is Bitcoin Twitter still a thing, I guess? Oh, yeah. Okay. Because yeah, like a lot of the people that I've seen on Twitter seemed fairly anti-crypto recently. Well, I mean, that's true and it's not. You have the phenomenon of people in crypto who retire and they basically do one of two things at that point. They either become a full-time Twitter and Clubhouse Troll or they just retire and go and live a life doing something else. Those are the two ways that I kind of see it, but they're still definitely a major crypto Twitter presence as it's called. And within that, the Bitcoin cohort is typically referred to as the Bitcoin Maxis. And their whole shtick is that they don't like anything that isn't Bitcoin and think that anything that isn't Bitcoin is a scam. I'm not saying that's right or that's wrong, but that's basically the simplified version of the Bitcoin maximalist position. And that tends to be when you hear people talking about Bitcoin people on Twitter, they typically are talking about Bitcoin maximalists in the context of them being angry about something another protocol is doing. I don't spend much time on Twitter, but what time I do spend, I wish I didn't spend any time on Twitter. That's interesting. But then, so why do you do it? Because it's become like, what is the current zeitgeist in any of these particular communities? You can go there and Twitter is in a place where people go to talk to people they disagree with. It's a place they go to talk about people they disagree with to their own internal audiences. And that's basically what everybody's doing, is everybody's talking to their own bubble. And so you can go there and you can see, oh, here's what this group of people thinks, here's what this group of people thinks. And when they interact, I mean, that sometimes happens. But again, it's mostly performative as far as I can tell, for their own already existing audiences, much more than it is because they actually want to have a discussion and learn something, right? Yeah, maybe some of this is about fundraising them than helping groups that are mostly aligned with each other raise money for various things. I don't know. I think there's definitely a direct payments element, right? Like the chat application Clubhouse that we've talked about once or twice in the past, like it announced that it wasn't ever going to do advertisers or sponsor-supported stuff. And instead, what it was doing is it was turning on user-to-user payments so that if you like what somebody is saying and you're in a room listening to them talk, because it's basically like participatory radio, then you can just send them some money. I haven't actually done this at all. I kind of stopped using Clubhouse around this time. Jonathan, are you still into this? I haven't used it as much as I used to, but I do jump in and out. And I really like Clubhouse. I like it for the conversations and the groups of people that I know on it. But I do get really skieved out by the like simp thought dynamic of like, you know, here's my cash app in my profile kind of thing. Like it doesn't happen a lot, at least not in the rooms I go to. But whatever it does, it really does skew me out and I end up just going to a different room where that's not the vibe. But there are a lot of rooms where someone will speak and then they'll be like, and my cash app is in my profile. Yeah. So again, like this is kind of a move towards that as well, which is just like when we were talking about this, you know, in 2013, the idea of users paying users directly irrespective of whether you're talking about Bitcoin or anything else was a weird idea. It just wasn't a thing that typically happened. And over the last number of years, we've just seen that concept, you know, not to speak about kind of Bitcoin broadly, just become more and more and more and more and more normal. And by nature of that, I mean, it's kind of like all of these companies have figured out that really the best business model they can possibly go for in any scenario is to actually just become a little mini bank, right? That's not really a bank as far as regulatory purposes are concerned, but which has some of the same dynamics about their business model and that basically just allows them to provide a platform and then to take a small cut, you know, of tips and money that generally is flowing through. Now, I don't actually know if Clubhouse does take a cut and as far as I can tell, Twitter does not take a cut. But again, like that's where these business models eventually go as far as I can tell, but I guess we have to wait and see. So we're pretty much at the end of today's show. Before we go again, just like any final thoughts on tipping, any final thoughts on not really about Twitter, but just like, is this a thing we're going to see coming back or is this really just kind of like Twitter virtue signaling with something that literally is six years out of date? No, I think that this is becoming more and more of a thing. And Adam, when you started trying to do this in 2013 and you said YouTube is broken, you were just ahead of the time. So what else is there? You were just a little bit ahead of time. And now it's really coming to pass, especially when we're seeing, you know, more and more content, moderation, filtering and censorship on the larger platforms. And when that happens, people just go to platforms that are more free if they have something controversial to say and then they try to get their subscribers to support them directly. And I like what you said about where it's at with trying to cultivate an audience is getting people who are really excited about your message and passionate supporters instead of people like, you know, just a lot of people who are kind of meh blah, right? It's always better to have those real hardcore fans and then ask them to support you. And I think that people who have tried to do that, like Andreas, you know, as well as a great example of that, what he's done, they've been rewarded. And so Bitcoin is one avenue or other cryptocurrencies is one avenue for direct kind of democratic, I guess, content producer support. And I think it's here to stay, especially as we see more content, moderation and censorship on the big platforms. I mean, it's cool that Twitter's going to start supporting Bitcoin and Bitcoin transactions, but they have no credit in the thought that they would ever be a part of the solution and not a part of the problem. And I think that the more they involve themselves with deeper and more complex components of society is to more intertwine themselves with becoming a deeper part of the problem and not a part of the solution. And I'm highly skeptical that anything they do in Bitcoin will lead towards a better outcome for the community, the protocol or humanity at large rather than sort of what they're up to these days already. I can't wait for Twitter to start blocking lightning relays on the basis of like de-platforming for problematic tweets and they establish a social graph of how to route your payments on the basis of who you should disassociate with because of their problematic tweets. Yeah, I could see that happening. All I'm saying is I think it's great that Twitter is integrating Bitcoin and I can't wait for when they route all this information into your social credit score that'll determine whether or not you get to go outside or have a job. Okay, folks, that is all the time we have for this episode of Speaking of Bitcoin. Got to cut you off, Jonathan. No, I'm just kidding. Today's show features Stephanie Murphy, Jonathan Mohan and Adam B. Levine with Editing by Jonas. This episode featured music from Jared Rubins and Gertie Beatz. You can send me an email at adamatspeakingofbitcoin.show. And until next time, thanks for listening.