Dec 16, 2022

Jack Dorsey donated roughly 14 BTC, about $245,000, to further fund development of Nostr, an open protocol that aims to create a censorship-resistant global social network.

Video transcript

Jack Dorsey recently said that he blames himself for giving Twitter too much power to regulate speech. In a blog post he published, he said the company became burdened with too much power and outside pressure from advertising budgets and said he says Twitter should have focused on tools to more easily manage con conversations by themselves. In the same blog post, he announced that he would be donating $1 million per year to signal. And in separate news, he has donated 14 Bitcoin worth almost $250,000 to noster an Oak Protocol that aims to create a censorship resistant global social network. Adam, I'm kicking this one right off to you. It seems like Jack has some regrets about how he handled Twitter and is maybe trying to make up for that through these donations. Yeah, I mean, I think that it's a, you know, it's a tough situation to, to be in that uh that he is in right now. But I think that as we continue to see, uh you know, Musk, the Musk Own Twitter release new things through independent journalism, like uh in independent journalists like Barry Weiss, uh and Matt Taibi, we're seeing that he was largely a passenger. Uh It seems within kind of the entity that he was nominally the CEO of, and there were a lot of these decisions that were to be made, they were being made that intensely shaped the conversation over the last, you know, four or five years, uh which were made with what should look like partisan objectives and kind of, uh here's the, you know, the criminal. Now, now let's reverse engineer this thing to find the crime. So I think that again, like he's been put a little bit to shame by what Musk has done since he took over the organization. And I think that it, it, you know, he's looking for a way to kind of reclaim some of the uh like the, the, the high profile ness, like the, he was, he was a really respected person, um you know, during, uh for a long period of time in the tech industry and kind of, I think that what we're seeing isn't a good look for him. Uh Certainly not kind of what happened within Twitter. And uh as we get more transparency, I actually now having read what I've read, anticipate that that will be more obvious, not less obvious as time goes on. So I, I also think that it's great frankly to support these additional services and really where I would love, love to see something like Twitter go and really wanted to see Twitter go when Jack was in charge of it was towards a protocol based uh you know, type of solution here where rather than Twitter being, you know, this service unto itself, it was actually just the largest participant in a decentralized network that was making it so that you could eliminate things like lock in, you could eliminate things like platform level, you know, censorship. Uh since there would still be this kind of lower lying under, you know, like uh publishing layer as opposed to just the curation layer. So lots to talk about here, but uh happy to see it but not super impressed with Jack anymore. Uh Who wants it next? Uh How about you will? Yeah, I'll snag it. I think Jack Dorsey's love for protocols and love for like a new Twitter version of, you know, something open source, something where anyone can use. It is definitely part of the story here. But I think the bigger story is really what's going on with Elon Musk right now and the track Elon Jet saga, uh we saw last night that a lot of mainstream reporters were actually suspended for at least seven days uh because they quote unquote docked Elon's location by giving an address. And then on top of that, we saw that Elon Musk jumped into a Twitter Spaces last night to defend his actions. And then when he got got, he deleted all of Twitter Spaces entirely. Can't really use the function right now and people are questioning why that happened. So I think this just like sheds a light on if you have the public space, if you have a public sphere and you own it and you might start making changes to it, people are gonna have questions. People are not going to like what you're doing, seeing a lot of different comments from journalists over the last 24 hours saying that they're not impressed with Elon's decisions right now. And I thinking Twitter might not be the safe space. It is for conversation like it has been in the past. So whether you like Twitter or not or you like the changes that Elon has been doing the last 24 hours has definitely changed the conversation quite a bit. And I think we have to look at whatever Jack is doing in the open protocol in light of what Elon is doing with Twitter, Zach, I'll throw it up to you. Yeah, I think the Elon Jet thing is, is pretty funny. I think if you kind of strip it back to what it really is about, I think it's about public data and I think there's a lot of sort of interesting parallels to what open ledgers, open blockchains provide also in terms of public data, right? Elon Jet is tracked by various services by virtue of this data being at least partially public right, commercial airline traffic is published to the web. I think there's some hoops that you have to go through to find the the flight data for private jets, right? So that aside, but what it comes down to is an attack on public data and publicness more generally, right? I think there's a really interesting line in the Jack Dorsey Post and it is quote, transparency builds trust. And I think if you look at that as juxtaposed against this Eon Jett saga, I don't know what the takeaway is. There's something as it relates to open data, the fight for public things, the fight for private things. And I don't know if public data is gonna have a good next few years because it's gonna get really interesting.

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