On Saturday (April 9), prolific Twitter user and Dogecoin ($DOGE) advocate Elon Musk, who is the CEO of both Tesla and SpaceX, offered some advice on how Twitter Blue, which is Twitter’s first-ever subscription offering, could be improved.

As CNBC reported on Monday (April 4), a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) 13G filing released on that day revealed that Musk owns 73,486,938 shares of Twitter, which represents a 9.2% passive stake in the company.

Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal said the following day that Musk would be joining the company’s board of directors:

And Jack Dorsey, co-founder and former CEO of Twitter, also seemed happy:

It is worth pointing out that less than two weeks earlier, Musk was criticizing Twitter for not sufficiently supporting free speech.

As for Twitter Blue, this opt-in, paid monthly subscription service was announced on 3 June 2021. Twitter’ blog post mentioned that a Twitter Blue subscription offers the following premium features:

  • bookmark folders
  • tweet undo
  • reader mode

Twitter Blue, which is available on Twitter for iOS, Android and web in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, costs around $3 per month.

Twitter pointed out in the Help Center section of its website that paying for a Twitter Blue subscription would not eliminate the showing of ads and explained why:

“Currently, ads continue to fund our ability to innovate as we grow this new part of our business. Twitter Blue does include an Ad-free Articles feature which offers subscribers a fast-loading, ad-free reading experience on the websites of publishers within the Twitter Blue Publisher Network…

“Twitter Blue is a completely opt-in experience, and these initial features were designed for a specific segment of engaged users. Ultimately our goal is to provide enough value through premium features that people feel that it is worth paying for. 

“For now, there’s a cost of operation for creating even more layers to the Twitter experience. We want to keep it reasonably priced and make sure you see value in the features that are being delivered. There may be a bit of a learning process here, and we will be monitoring for feedback.“

Well, yesterday, in a series of tweets, Musk made a number of suggestions for how Twitter Blue could be improved:

The Tesla CEO believes that the subscription fee should be reduced to $2 per month (“paid 12 months up front”), that there should be no ads, and that Twitter should consider allowing the subscription fee to be paid in Dogecoin ($DOGE).

Dogecoin, which was initially released on 6 December 2013, as a “fun and friendly internet currency.” It was created by Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer. It is “a decentralized, peer-to-peer digital currency” that has as its mascot “Doge”, a Shiba Inu (a Japanese breed of dog). Since then, its popularity has substantially increased to the point that it is currently the 11th most valuable cryptocurrency, with a market cap of nearly $20 billion.

On 1 April 2019, the people behind the Twitter account of Dogecoin, conducted a Twitter poll to find out who the Dogecoin community thinks should be the honorary “CEO” of Dogecoin.

The following day, Musk — who had called Bitcoin’s structure “quite brilliant” in a podcast interview in February 2019 — found out about this poll, after which he sent out the following tweet:

Late December 2021, in an interview for episode #252 of the Lex Fridman podcast, Musk talked about Bitcoin and its disadvantages (vs something like Dogecoin) as a form of payment:

“There’s a fundamental issue with Bitcoin in its current form in that its transaction volume is very limited and the latency for confirmed transactions is too long — much longer than you’d like. So, it’s not it’s actually not great from a transaction volume standpoint or a latency standpoint.

“So, perhaps, it’s useful to solve an aspect of the money database problem, which is store of wealth or an accounting of relative obligations, I suppose. But it is not useful as a currency, as a day-to-day currency…

“Part of the reason why I think there’s some merit to Dogecoin — even though it was obviously created as a joke — is that it actually does have much higher transaction value capability than Bitcoin and the costs of doing a transaction — the Dogecoin fee — is very low.

“Right now, if you wanted to do a Bitcoin transaction, the price of doing that transaction is very high and so you cannot use it effectively for most things. Nor could it scale to a higher volume…

“When Bitcoin was started — around 2008 — the internet connections were much worse than they are today, like an order of magnitude…. I mean there’s the way way worse, you know, 2008. So having a small block size and a long synchronization made sense in 2008, but in 2021, it’s like comically low…

“And I think there’s some value to having a linear increase in the amount of currency that is generated… If a currency is too deflationary… there’s a reluctance to spend it… But if this some dilution of the currency occurring over time, that’s more of an incentive to use it as a currency.

“So, Dogecoin, sort of randomly, has just a fixed number of coins… that generate every year. So, there’s some inflation, but it’s a fixed number. So, the percentage of inflation will necessarily decline over time. I’m not saying that it’s like the ideal system for a currency, but I think it actually is just fundamentally better than anything else I’ve seen — just by accident.“

Disclaimer

The views and opinions expressed by the author, or any people mentioned in this article, are for informational purposes only, and they do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice. Investing in or trading cryptoassets comes with a risk of financial loss.