In a surprising revelation of private chats between Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk, it has come out that both of them have suggested that the microblogging platform, Twitter should be based on an “open source protocol, like ‘Signal’ and should be funded by a foundation.”
Kate Conger, a New York Times reporter, tweeted out the archives of the text messages taken from the court documents which were highlighted by Internal Tech Emails.
The private messages were unearthed in Musk’s legal case with Twitter and its Board of Directors, which is attempting to hold Musk to the offer of buying Twitter.
Text messages of Musk with tech biggies like Dorsey, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, and investor-podcaster Jason Calcanis are a part of the archive.
In the message that was around the time Dorsey exited Twitter’s board, Musk appreciated Dorsey’s expressed vision, calling it “super interesting”.
Quite opposed to the conventional corporate ownership, Dorsey recommended not having an advertising model. He explained that having an advertising model gives a surface area that the government and advertisers will try to influence and control.
“If it has a centralized entity behind, it will be attacked” he said.
Seemingly favouring the idea, Musk said, “I think it’s worth both trying to move Twitter in a better direction and doing something new that’s decentralized.”
Further, the messages reveal that thoughts were also exchanged on a future privacy focussed blockchain backed replacement to Twitter.
FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried also added his two cents to this discussion saying, “Would love to talk about Twitter. Also, a post on how blockchain-Twitter could work.”
At one point, Musk suggested an idea for a blockchain social media system that can do both payments and short text messages or links like Twitter.
The idea, Musk added, is to enable users to pay a small amount to register a message on-chain, to prevent the majority of spams and bots.
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“There is no throat to choke, so free speech is guaranteed” he said. And further elaborated that the idea of blockchain free speech has been lingering on for a long time but the question is how to execute it.
Musk suggested Anthony Rose, head of engineering at Matter Labs and a former SpaceX engineering manager’s name to lead the potential project.
Well, Musk also recommended paying 0.1 Dogecoin for posting or reposting comments. Revealing his Plan B, he commented that a blockchain-based version of Twitter can also be introduced, where the ‘tweets’ are included in the transaction as comments.
However, Musk further pointed out the issue in this plan saying that the bandwidth and latency requirements cannot be backed by a peer-to-peer network “unless those ‘peers’ are absolutely gigantic”. Thus, defeats the whole purpose of a decentralized network.
