Crypto could help with Elon Musk’s Twitter identity problem

Much fury has been created on Twitter about Elon Musk’s new “blue tick” (chin) verification scheme. Existing blue ticks (full disclosure: I’m one) are up in arms about the plan, which will give anyone a blue badge on their tweets if they pay Musk $8 a month, no questions asked. Twitter Blue marketing makes it clear that there will be no identity verification. Pseudonymous accounts may receive blue ticks.

Musk has expressed hope that opening up the blue tick scheme to a much wider audience will eliminate hate speech on Twitter and stop the spread of bots, spammers and fraudsters. But I’m afraid he’s completely wrong. The $8 per month payment is nearly enough to compensate for the elimination of centralized identity checks. And the reason should be completely obvious to anyone familiar with crypto, and especially the problem that Bitcoin originally solved – the problem of “Byzantine generals”.

Frances Coppola, a CoinDesk columnist, is a freelance writer and speaker on banking, finance and economics. Her book”The case for people’s quantitative easing” explains how modern money creation and quantitative easing work, and advocates “helicopter money” to help economies out of recession.

The problem with Byzantine generals is about the difficulty of reliably establishing identity in a distributed system that has no reliable central authority. The original 1982 research paper by Leslie Lamport, Robert Shostok, and Marshall Pease imagined several armies besieging Byzantium, each army led by a general—hence the name “Byzantine General’s Problem.” Some of the generals and their subordinates are traitors trying to confuse the rest. Without knowing who the traitors are, and with only verbal messages as a means of communication – or perhaps Twitter – the loyal generals must coordinate their attacks. The research paper shows that in the absence of a reliable central authority, the loyal generals will not be able to coordinate their attacks if the proportion of traitors among the generals and their subordinates is too high.

Twitter’s blue ticks are a fine example of the problem with Byzantine generals. The blue tick is meant to prove that the Twitter account is actually run by the person it claims to represent. So, for example, an account called “Joe Biden” has a blue check mark to prove that it is run by the real US President Joe Biden (or his staff), not an impostor. But blue ticks are awarded through an opaque process run by a centralized team at Twitter, which is not accountable to the Twitter community and is suspected of corruption. Rumors are circulating that blue ticks can be bought for $15,000 or $36,000 or some such amount. There is no evidence that this is true, but it doesn’t matter. People believe the rumours, and that is enough to destroy trust. The blue tick that was supposed to reliably identify celebrities, influencers, companies and brands is no longer reliable.

Enter Elon Musk, the savior of the blue tick. He proposes to eliminate the existing centralized verification process entirely, and instead provide blue checks to anyone willing to pay $8 per month, including pseudonymous accounts. This is a decentralized solution because people will decide for themselves whether to pay the subscription rather than the allocation of blue ticks being decided by a central trusted authority. As with existing blue ticks, the new blue tick will provide benefits in terms of platform visibility – the Twitter algorithm boosts tweets issued by blue ticks over those of regular users. The subscription fee is presumably intended to be low enough to encourage real Twitter users to sign up for blue ticks, but high enough to dissuade bots, spammers, and scammers. Means it?

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The authors of the paper “Byzantine Generals” say that any solution to the problem is necessarily expensive. Satoshi Nakamoto’s solution (proof-of-work) is actually expensive, as is proof-of-stake, recently adopted by Ethereum. But as Elon Musk himself pointed out, $8 per month is the price of a Starbucks latte. Of course, some people cannot afford this. But I would suggest that most Twitter users – and certainly those who have, or want, blue ticks, easily can. It’s small change. And for some of Twitter’s most toxic elements, creating the impression of authenticity and amplifying their tweets will be well worth it.

Of course, there is still centralized moderation of tweets. Liberalization of blue ticks is not Carte Blanche to post hate speech on the platform. But I look forward to the lawsuits when Twitter starts suspending accounts that pay $8 a month.

More importantly, $8 per month doesn’t seem to create much of a deterrent for bots, spammers and scammers, or even the sock puppet accounts that infect the platform. For them, tweet amplification is gold. I predict that bot and sockpuppet farms will bulk buy blue ticks, and crypto spam accounts like shilling tokens will all have blue ticks and there will be an epidemic of blue tick phishers.

A good idea

However, Musk’s goal of enabling regular Twitter users to get blue ticks is commendable. And there is no doubt that the existing centralized process is unfit for purpose. So how could Twitter create an identity verification process that didn’t rely on a centralized authority, was open to anyone who could prove their identity, and discouraged fascists, bots, spammers, scammers, and sock puppets?

Well, Musk could do worse than looking at the solutions adopted by the cryptocurrencies he is so fond of. Both Proof of Work and Proof of Stake use a community-led process with volunteer verifiers. The verifiers are motivated by the potential for rewards, and kept honest by harsh financial penalties for abusing the system. Verification is expensive for the verifiers, but not for the users whose transactions are verified – they only pay transaction fees (gas). Could such a system work for Twitter verification?

There is an obvious problem, and that is that verifiers have no more idea than anyone else whether an account that has applied for verification is malicious. But Twitter users are pretty good at identifying malicious accounts. There is no reason to assume that Twitter verifiers who have staked a whole lot of money (much more than $8 per month) for the right to verify identity would be any worse off – in fact, they would have an obvious incentive to get it right, if the penalty for accidentally confirming (say) a neo-Nazi account was to lose part or all of the ownership. And all it takes is for enough of them to agree. Some kind of majority voting system would work. It’s complex, but certainly not beyond the ability of the bright minds in the tech world to solve.

What Rewards Can Elon Musk Offer Twitter Verifiers? Well, he could offer money: treat them as shareholders, pay them dividends. Or he could offer them voting rights, for example when introducing new facilities. But would he agree to such a dilution of his power?

It seems to me that this is the fundamental problem. Twitter, the decentralized “town square”, was unfortunately so centralized that it could be taken over by a dictator. Dictators are usually not that keen on decentralization.

I hope that Elon Musk’s long-standing interest in crypto will encourage him to look at decentralized solutions to the problems he rightly identifies. But that could mean stepping back from Twitter and setting the community free to fly on its own.