• she/her, it/its

gay ass artist and programmer, i guess. 23. works on botania, the minecraft mod. also into weird functional programming stuff. talk to me about monads (or applicatives if you're even cooler)


lexi
@lexi

so a friend of mine sent me a tweet. it looked like this: twitter.com/_/status/xxxxxxxxxxxx9280000

and the conversation went like this:

lexi: damn that tweet has a lot of trailing zeroes

[Replying to lexi: damn that tweet has a lot of trailing zeroes]
lexi: oh no
lexi: oh god oh fuck

if you're a math nerd you can probably guess where this is going. if not, please watch But how does bitcoin actually work? by 3b1b

but yeah.

you can build a centralized proof-of-work blockchain on twitter.

not linking it to twitter in some form, but actually running the fucking blockchain on twitters infrastructure by using tweets as blocks and tweeting as mining. i am not fucking joking

instead of using sha256 hashes you can use the much more eco-friendly twitter backend. it wouldn't require proof of GPU work, but proof of time (and proof of credentials) because the api is rate limited and fuck twitter, i dont pay the server bills lol

the proof is super simple: your tweets get an ID. and ~22 of those bits are more or less out of your control (worker ID and sequence number). you get n trailing zeroes, you get the block. you could also introduce threads [as in chained twitter replies by one person, not cpu workloads] to exponentially increase the necessary work if more than like 1k people mine on twitter, so even some bad RNG isnt a problem here.

you can link to previous blocks by literally just linking to another tweet. and you could automatically backup all successfully mined blocks on an internet archive (wouldnt cost them a lot of bandwidth bc only a tiny fraction of all tweets need to get archived) and you literally have a stable (but more or less centralized) blockchain.

you could genuinely just rip off most of the original bitcoin implementation and implement it with twitter as the underlying blockchain infrastructure.

this is so incredibly cursed. i should not be allowed to be on the internet


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in reply to @lexi's post:

One of my favorite activities on the rare occasions that crypto-types want to talk to me is listen very carefully to what they say, and then choose one of two questions to ask them.

  • So...it's a linked list?
  • So...your high-tech money that will be a force for equality gives money to whoever can afford to waste the most CPU cycles?

And then continue until they walk away wondering who they are. Which is all to say, Twitcoin!

i love this idea for one very specific reason.

If this actually got adopted by cryptobros who then try to mine as much as possible to gain as much profit as possible, I imagine it’d eventually become too much for the poor servers at Twitter to handle and we might actually see the end of the platform