Is Twitter a public ledger?

Yes, yes it is and that may be why Musk wants it

I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans.

The reason is that it’s a new messaging protocol, where you don’t specify the recipients. New protocols are rare. Or more precisely, new protocols that take off are. There are only a handful of commonly used ones: TCP/IP (the Internet), SMTP (email), HTTP (the web), and so on. So any new protocol is a big deal. But Twitter is a protocol owned by a private company. That’s even rarer.

Curiously, the fact that the founders of Twitter have been slow to monetize it may in the long run prove to be an advantage. Because they haven’t tried to control it too much, Twitter feels to everyone like previous protocols. One forgets it’s owned by a private company. That must have made it easier for Twitter to spread.

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Skoll Chair in Innovation & Entrepreneurship at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto and Chief Economist, Creative Destruction Lab.

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Joshua Gans

Skoll Chair in Innovation & Entrepreneurship at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto and Chief Economist, Creative Destruction Lab.