Dogecoin Surges 70% After Elon Musk's Twitter Deal (reuters.com) 80
Noting that Elon Musk once called Dogecoin "the people's crypto," Reuters reports that on Saturday the price of Dogecoin surged more than 70%, "extending this week's gains after Elon Musk sealed a $44-billion deal to take over Twitter..."
Cryptocurrency exchange Binance which has invested $500 million into Musk's buyout of Twitter, said it is brainstorming strategies on how blockchain and crypto could be helpful to Twitter....
Musk tweeted this month that he is buying Twitter to create an "everything app". The idea of an everything app originated in Asia with companies like WeChat, which lets users not only send messages but also make payments, shop online or hail a taxi.
Musk tweeted this month that he is buying Twitter to create an "everything app". The idea of an everything app originated in Asia with companies like WeChat, which lets users not only send messages but also make payments, shop online or hail a taxi.
Creating an "everything app" (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, good luck with that.
Re:Creating an "everything app" (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine looking at WeChat and saying to yourself "yes, this is a good idea."
Re: (Score:2)
Imagine looking at WeChat and saying to yourself "yes, this is a good idea."
As a technical person I get what you are saying but....
Imagine looking at how *many people* use WeChat every day, quite heavily, and NOT thinking it's worth trying to do something like that? I mean, it seems like a pretty worthy goal if you can get that many people to use your app, even if it's a nightmare hairball of a UI.
Re: (Score:3)
This is not the case elsewhere and if an app becomes bloated garbage then people have a tendency to jump ship to something else. Social media being a case in point where Facebook is looking increasingly like MySpace compared to some of its new rivals.
Re: (Score:1)
I suspect the users of WeChat put up with it because they live in a heavily censored dictatorship.
Yeah, they don't "put up" with anything. They simply have no choice.
WeChat is used for pretty much all economical and social online interactions in China, and are thus closely monitored by the CCP,
Re: (Score:3)
I suspect the users of WeChat put up with it because they live in a heavily censored dictatorship.
There are hundreds of millions of WeChat users outside China, including 19 million Americans. I am one of them. I use it to chat with my friends in Asia and the Asian-American community. I can use it to pay in many American restaurants and shops.
Even if the app had some viable rival
It does have a rival. Alibaba also has an "everything app".
Re: (Score:2)
It does have a rival. Alibaba also has an "everything app".
So another piece of software closely monitored by the CCP. What a difference!
Re: (Score:2)
WeChat says that if an American talks to another American, the conversation is secure. But out of an abundance of caution, I refrain from using WeChat to say, "Xi Jinping is a poopyhead."
Otherwise, WeChat works well for me. I can talk to friends in the PRC. I have stranded money in a Chinese bank that I can't convert to USDs because of China's capital controls. But with WeChat, I can spend those RMBs in America instead of dollars. A Chinese restaurant can then pay their staff directly to their Chinese bank
Re: (Score:2)
WeChat says that if an American talks to another American, the conversation is secure. But out of an abundance of caution, I refrain from using WeChat to say, "Xi Jinping is a poopyhead."
So , in other words, even you don't believe what they say. Why support such a thing?
Re: (Score:2)
I suspect the users of WeChat put up with it because they live in a heavily censored dictatorship.
WeChat is used heavily across Asia as I understand it, just China mainland.
But I do wonder as an alternative explanation, if WeChat is one of the few apps designed by people who speak asian languages. Most other apps are designed by westerners, and just localized for the market so maybe not quite in tune with asian design preferences.
Re: (Score:2)
LINE is a bit of an everything-app designed in Japan. It's pretty popular in Asia as well.
Re:Creating an "everything app" (Score:5, Insightful)
Everybody wants to make the one app that everybody use.
One of the problems is that it becomes a single point of cancel. When your de-facto only payment option is via $APP, and $APP decides to cancel you for something you said on Instatwit and they disagree with, you are effectively pushed out of the society.
A private company should not have government authority. Read "The Circle" for inspiration.
Re: (Score:2)
As a technical person I get what you are saying but.... Imagine looking at how *many people* use WeChat every day, quite heavily, and NOT thinking it's worth trying to do something like that?
You do understand this happens in China, right? Where you have no option but to use WeChat for quite literally everything online?
This is not a technical problem to solve; i'm sure many before Musk would've loved to sell you an "everything app".
Re: (Score:2)
When will tech nerds become intelligent enough to be introspective, analyse themselves, and realize they have no idea what they're talking about outside of technical issues?
Re: (Score:2)
If you think "WeChat for the West"is a terrible idea for technical reasons, you're completely delusional. Sorry.
Re: (Score:2)
WeChat is uniquitous in China. WeChat has buy-in in China, regardless of whether it was a good idea, technically, or socially.
Same with Twitter, and what it would become with this.
Whether or not it is a good thing for us socially, the ONLY metric that will decide this new everything-Twitter is how big it becomes.
Re: (Score:2)
WeChat is uniquitous in China. WeChat has buy-in in China, regardless of whether it was a good idea, technically, or socially.
Wow, you sound very clever.
a) Why do you think WeChat has "buy-in" in China?
b) And how would you replicate this in the West?
Re: (Score:1)
And the iPod was was going to be a failure.
Given enough time, the prediction ended up being correct. Apple abandoned the dedicated digital music player market quite awhile ago. The thing they call an iPod these days is really just an iPhone without a cellular modem.
Re: (Score:2)
Given enough time, the prediction ended up being correct.
But it didn't. It gave rise to the iPhone. The iPhone is an iPod. So no, your argument just proved the point.
Re: (Score:1)
But it didn't. It gave rise to the iPhone. The iPhone is an iPod. So no, your argument just proved the point.
The iPhone is more closely a spiritual successor to the Apple Newton [wikipedia.org] than it is to the iPod. Even the iPod app on the original iPhone featured a redesigned UI which bore little resemblance to the scroll-wheel-driven interface of the iPod.
The iPod was originally intended to be a "halo effect" accessory to convince people to purchase Macintosh computers. That's why it initially wasn't supported under Windows. The irony is that the iPod that eventually became successful wasn't the "no wireless, less space t
Re: (Score:2)
Sadly WeChat is immensely popular, and profitable. It sucks for the users, the owner now has masses more data on them and that one account they use to shitpost on social media is also needed to pay for stuff, find work and more.
For Musk it must seem like a great idea. Turn all those Twitter users into multiple revenue streams. He will quickly discover that those users will switch to something else when he tries to monetize them too much.
Re: (Score:2)
Sadly WeChat is immensely popular, and profitable
Yes... in China, where is pretty much mandatory to chat with friends, do payments or even perform business communications. Imagining that such a scheme can be just carbon copied into an app for the West is outright delussional.
Musk should know, after he tried to reinvent banking via PayPal.
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed. A bloated insecure monster is just what the world needs. With a cretin as overlord in this special case to make it even better.
Re: (Score:3)
$44B for Twitters codebase and something like 20% of their staff and will still have to build on the "everything" else that doesn revolve around making Tweets.
Re: (Score:2)
$44B for Twitters codebase and something like 20% of their staff and will still have to build on the "everything" else that doesn revolve around making Tweets.
Tesla. SpaceX. Hell, he even made Boring exciting.
Rather ironic we're being quite shortsighted about a pioneer of electrical transport and planetary exploration. Those two things alone may soon mean everything to humanity as we continue to turn our home into a toxic cesspool.
Re: (Score:2)
Tesla. SpaceX. Hell, he even made Boring exciting.
Tesla was already up and running and on the verge of getting cars made when Musk bought out the original owners. All he did was piggyback off someone else's success. And billions of taxpayer dollars.
SpaceX was built on the backs of taxpayers.
The Boring Company is just that, boring. He bored a small tunnel underneath Las Vegas so he could put his cars in it which travel at slow speed, not the massive high speed whiz bang shuttle he repeatedly said he would
Re: (Score:2)
Also amongst those 3 companies Boring has really stalled out on the stated goal. When it started the whole idea was to massively reduce the cost-per-mile of underground tunneling machine work which as far as I can tell has not really happened. It's been like 5+ years and we have a novelty tunnel in Las Vegas. I wish them well but I think that was a way harder engineering problem than they had expected.
Re: (Score:2)
Tesla was just over 7 months old when they raised their first major funding from investors and Musk was one of those original investors. Source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
At that point in time their first car (the Roadster) was still 2,5 years away from being revealed to the public and some 4 years away from entering production. Musk had, as the chairman of the board of owners, involved himself in the product design of the Roadster. So they were not on the verge of getting anything made by the time Mu
Re: (Score:2)
Did you reply to the wrong person? Did I say that those things weren't true?
My point is if that was his goal he wasted a shitload of resources in buying Twitter. He could probably put 1/4 of that $44B into starting a new company to start an app from scratch to do all those things. Also I find the Twitter purchase especially stupid because SpaceX amongst all of those is by far the most exciting and most important and Twitter is a useless distraction. Every day the guy is in Twitter HQ is a day he's not in
Re: (Score:2)
The real gain from $44b is time savings. It's a lot faster to restructure something that already half-works than start from scratch.
Re: (Score:2)
Sure, buying a userbase is easier than building from scratch but you don't "own" the users and people are fickle. Ask News Corp how many users they got in the end by purchasing MySpace, how many users Warner got in the end by purchasing AOL and how many users Yahoo k,ept in purchasing Tumblr and then Verizon got by purchasing Yahoo, all in historys scrapbin as terrible deals.
If $44B saves you 3 years you are paying $14B a year to hope you can retain those users as an already contentious and polarizing pub
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Did you reply to the wrong person? Did I say that those things weren't true?
My point is if that was his goal he wasted a shitload of resources in buying Twitter...
Musk did not buy Twitter to make massive profits. He invested in it for reasons other than money or fame. He essentially made a significant donation to Free Speech. His little experiment may not even work, as people may just go elsewhere to be just as divisive and limiting to their adversaries, as we may find that shit is sadly the true addiction. But he still felt the purchase necessary in order to not only invest in what he personally believes in, but to also perhaps prove a point as to just how hollo
Re: (Score:2)
Musk did not buy Twitter to make massive profits. He invested in it for reasons other than money or fame. He essentially made a significant donation to Free Speech.
Give me a fucking break. Are we're going to act he didn't go to court and try get off purchasing Twitter, after (finally) realizing what a shit deal that was?
Re: (Score:2)
"According to an SEC filing dated July 8, 2022, Musk's lawyer accused Twitter of breach of the agreement...Musk and his financial advisors at Morgan Stanley have been requesting critical information from Twitter since May 9, 2022, to no avail....He also stated that follow-up letters were sent to Twitter on the 25th and 29th of May 2022. He further stated that Musk sent three more follow-up letters requesting the same information on June 6th, June 17th, and June 29th, all in 2022."
https://www.makeuseof.co [makeuseof.com]
Re: (Score:2)
The $1bn breakup fee was only an option if both parties agreed to it.
The reaility is Agrawal convinced Musk to sign an increidbly one-sided contract, Musk got cold feet once he realized this, and spent monts trying to get out of it. And there's good reason for it.
Re: (Score:2)
You people really are fucking deluded.
Re: (Score:2)
All of this is opinion and speculation and flies in the face of his actual actions in regards to the Twitter purchase (and really a textbook case of the "weird nerds" taking a bullet for Musk meme)
If it was about "free speech" why the whole rigamarole about the bot percentage? Why the trial? Why wasnt this done 5 mopnths ago when the contract was signed? Again, post hoc.
Also he hasn't made any meaningful change just yet, no point about employees and nothing about free speech is known yet, it is far too earl
Re: (Score:2)
$44B for Twitters codebase and something like 20% of their staff and will still have to build on the "everything" else that doesn revolve around making Tweets.
"Everything" is already done, they just have to integrate it into one app, considering it took Twitter's software Engineers a year to implement an edit button, so they should have it done in time for mankind to boldly go where no man has gone before.
Re: Creating an "everything app" (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, good luck with that.
Making a vertically-landing, reusable rocket. Yeah, good luck with that. Transforming EVs from dorkmobiles to something not only practical, but also a status symbol. Yeah, good luck with that.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Creating an "everything app" (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, good luck with that.
I installed Uber for the first time in about 6 years. I don't understand the fascination with everything requiring scope creep. It used to be for getting a car. Now I was gobsmacked.
Yeah it also delivers food, okay I heard of that, but "provide safety information about your destination", "explore local fine dining", and WTF is "Uber Wallet"?
It seems like everything these days is trying to do "everything everywhere all at once" and I remind viewers that this movie involved traversing the multiverse by jumping arse first onto a trophy buttplug (no even joking).
Re: (Score:1)
I'll second that. I used my currency which was steadily losing 2-10% per year for the past 80yrs to buy some stuff after a disaster when there was no electricity or telecom services. Also, let's keep repeating "steadily losing 2-10% per year for the past 80yrs" so that we can identify the real suckers that don't understand that you use currency, you don't invest in it- that way we can figure out more ways to take advantag
Scary thing... it might just work (Score:3)
In China, WeChat is almost mandatory. Other than a few areas, pretty much all transactions use some type of system like TenCent, WeChat, or something similar. Elon Musk is one of the few people who could do the same in the US, effectively bypassing Visa and Mastercard to make a payment system.
Re: (Score:1, Troll)
Won't work in countries with functioning systems.
Re:Scary thing... it might just work (Score:4, Funny)
That's Twitter trying to become a payment system.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Oh, he has already tried. [time.com]
Re: (Score:2)
WeChat and QQ only got that way in China because the government backed them. Prior to those apps most transactions were in cash, and paid no tax. No income tax, no sales tax, many people didn't have a bank account, or only used it for savings. Now everyone is using apps to pay for stuff, every transaction can be traced and optionally taxed.
Musk's attempt to do the same will fail, because people won't be forced to use it.
The same thing happened to PayPal. When eBay was forcing everyone to use it, PayPal did
No one wants $$$ run by "unstable" cryptobro. (Score:2)
Elon Musk is one of the few people who could do the same in the US, effectively bypassing Visa and Mastercard to make a payment system.
You know how that crazy owner of Visa often posts shit online and fucks up EVERYONE'S ability to pay bills, receive money and completely devalues or overvalues money EVERYWHERE?
No?
How about that time Mastercard boss called a guy saving kids a pedo, wiping out everyone's ability to pay with Mastercard cause stores stopped accepting them?
No?
There's a reason for that.
One of them being that a payment system owned and run by a mentally unstable cryptobro IS NOT something anyone wants.
No. Not even in El Salvador. [theconversation.com]
Waiting for CateCoin (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm in!
(Bad moment, one of our cats died this morning :( )
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
https://currency.com/cat-meme-... [currency.com]
You're too late. Too late [youtu.be]!
Re: Waiting for CateCoin (Score:2)
https://coinmarketcap.com/curr... [coinmarketcap.com]
DLTs will dominate social (Score:1)
Eventually social media will transact with DLTs. Bluesky social is an example of a product that may usher this into mainstream. Also fee-less transaction DLTs are more likely to one day be the mainstream DLTs running social media. People and government entities will see (and already have) the value in de-siloed data ownership and will gravitate away from walled gardens.
Elon and his autocratic partners may have an early moment where they monetize things really well. Dogecoin won't survive in the long run
Re: (Score:2)
You're using "DLT" as if it's a well know thing.
Re: (Score:3)
Just in case you don't know how to use a search engine, I have done it for you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:1)
I love it when millenials think they've independently discovered distributed databases.
Re: (Score:2)
Also fee-less transaction DLTs are more likely to one day be the mainstream DLTs running social media.
Meaning they aren't a thing yet. Free beer tomorrow isn't a new joke.
https://twitter.com/27bslash6/... [twitter.com]
Solution in search of a problem (Score:3)
said it is brainstorming strategies on how blockchain and crypto could be helpful to Twitter....
The outcome will be a loss of anonymity and any ability to erase posted tweets whether by moderators or the original author. The set of people who see both those things as a positive is probably quite small.
Pump n dump (Score:3)
Dogecoin has nothing to do with Tesla (Score:3)
Musk himself even made that Crystal Clear the last time he appeared on SNL and every doge fan thought he'd put a good word in for Doge because they somehow believe he is a heavy investor himself, he's not - he said he bought some for his son as a joke at his birthday at some point.
He also said openly in an interview that it was a "joke" and that he had no interest in Dogecoin.
Why there are so many "fans" of this connected to Musk is beyond me, but hey - I'm guessing that there is a lot of investors that take advantage of the believers and will rugpull once it reaches a new fan-based height of believers who buys in when high, and then they will get rugpulled by the rich investors who bought in low right before this happened, simply because they KNOW the fans will go nuts and buy in high thinking they're gonna get rich.
History will repeat itself, it will go high while the fans are going crazy - and then when the fad has calmed down, they will wake up to the harsh reality of well...collective stupidity.
Straight line to... (Score:2)