The New-Era Bird App is Fulfilling X.com’s Original Vision
Over the last couple of months, there has been much talk about Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter and the hate narrative that has emerged in mainstream media. This tells us that there is resistance to change and a desire to maintain the status quo in the financial world. However, change is inevitable, and the rise of decentralized networks & Truth Twitter applies to that.
In this report we will delve into X.com and the prior discussions of decentralized trust networks around 2012 and how they are transforming the way we communicate and handle money. We will also review other articles from that time period to try and gain insights into the future of social media and the financial system. This research took me about 25 hours to put together so I hope you enjoy an exclusive reveal of the following content:
What Elon Musk is planning with Twitter infrastructure and his X.com Domain, and paths for the future of Twitter 2.0
Results of backlink analysis from X.com and the uncovering of documents that haven’t been shown on mainstream internet since 2012, which showcase some of the original vision of X.com
Comparisons of Facebook & Twitter users from A Decade of Growth- 2012 to 2022
An article showing how Ripple Trust Networks were an early discussion point from X.com and how they how they are Transforming Money, which lead me to find Ryan Frogger’s original Ripple website which dated back to 2006
Snippets from articles relating to X.com in 2012 discussing how The future of money is the Web, towards national cryptocurrencies, and what would happen if social media and payments merge and we discover a new payments utopia - and much more…
Elon Musk & the Twitter Acquisition
Let’s begin with Elon’s acquisition of Twitter that started on April 14 2022, and concluded on October 27 2022, for a price of $44 billion dollars. He has now taken Twitter from a public offering to a private company. Within the first month of his takeover, he provided the Twitter employees with two choices:
1. Stick around and help build his vision of “Hardcore Twitter 2.0” and that employees who choose to stay will be required to commit to working “long hours at high intensity”.
2. Say goodbye and accept a layoff. This decision allowed him to trim the fat at the company, which led to laying off over 3700 employees, leaving him with ones dedicated to bringing his vision of Twitter 2.0 to life.
In conversation with Ron Baron in Nov 2022, Musk said he will execute the X product plan “with some improvements”, which will make Twitter “the most valuable financial institution in the world” with his domain of X.com.
The Start to the End of an Era of Censored Speech
We all know the feeling of being censored and not having our voices heard. We all have opinions, and we should be able to share them regardless of whether they are deemed appropriate by others.
We have witnessed ample censorship on social media platforms. On Facebook, mainstream media outlets disable citizens from commenting on specific stories such as the Maxwell and Epstein articles. Why can’t citizens freely discuss the mainstream news articles? Why do they get to control what the masses can have conversations about when it comes to their content?
The old Twitter - pre-Elon Musk - did not have an edit button and it would censor citizens who did not fit the mainstream narrative. It is great to see some of the previously censored individuals get their voices back, allowing for a neutral town hall where all opinions can be heard and challenged.
Twitter Censored Information Around Leaked Hunter Biden laptop
If you want to learn about how extensively that Twitter manipulated content, please check out the newly released December 2nd 2022 “Twitter Files” that tell an incredible story from the inside of Twitter. It shows the Frankenstein-tale of a human-built mechanism, grown out of the control of its designer.
This story shows the old Twitter wasn’t balanced. Decisions were made based on contacts, and Twitter was overwhelmingly staffed by people of one political orientation. There were more channels for complaint open to the left-leaning individuals versus the right. With the proof from the Twitter Files, it was shown how Twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story by removing links and posting warnings that the link may be ‘unsafe’. They even blocked its transmission via direct message, a tool hitherto reserved for extreme cases. This was all done to prevent citizens from viewing the content involved with the leaked information on Hunter Biden’s laptop right before the 2020 Election.
Note: Since the time of writing there are now two more Twitter Files: #TwitterFiles2 #TwitterFiles3
Twitter 2.0 - The Bird App is Evolving & Obtaining a Money License
Twitter has started the registration procedure for processing payments by submitting documentation to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) on Nov 3, 2022.
Businesses must register with FinCEN in order to make money transfers, swap currencies, or pay checks. This will end up creating a never before seen “payments utopia'' by combining social media with instant and cheap cross-border payments. I think this is the start to major cryptocurrency adoption for specific networks with real-world utility.
Shoutout to Citizen @ChrisPaulHall on Twitter for sending this document my way!
A Blast From the Past! A Review of Documents Hidden From the Internet for over 10 years - X.Com Research Results…
Currently, when you go to X.com there is nothing to see as nothing on the website is public. Many people would just give up and move on, but I used this as motivation to dig deeper. I used my skill set of backlink analysis and started researching the domain of X.com to see what websites were linking to this domain. I found there were 2.1 million backlinks on the internet that point to X.com.
**A backlink is when a website links to another website in a piece of content, “A link leading back to their website”.**
With this ocean of information connecting to X.com, I spent hours digging through 25,000 links and seeing what I could find on this untouched topic. Out of the top 11 out of 25,000 backlinks I analyzed that are linked to X.com, these were the most important links that I found:
The Future of Commerce Will Combine Your Social Network and Mobile Device | X.commerce
How Seconds Is Democratizing Mobile Payments for Global Citizens | X.commerce
While researching, I was shocked at being able to gain access to these documents that have been buried & deleted from the internet - thank God for the great Web Archive! It's mind blowing to think about the fact that these articles were all written between 2010 - 2014 before PayPal became an independent, publicly traded company.
Please enjoy the following article summaries and the video above accompanying my research.
“How Ripple Networks are Transforming Money” | X.com
April 20, 2012 by Manu Sporny
As I was digging through my internet history from 10 years ago, I came across an article that caught my attention. The article was written by Manu Sporny for X.commerce, the e-commerce platform that was being developed by eBay.
In the article, Sporny discusses and explains a concept called Ripple Trust Networks, a decentralized network of payment channels that enables real-time, low-cost transactions between parties. He states it has the potential to greatly reduce the costs and complexities of cross-border payments compared to the expensive and slow correspondent banking system.
He also suggests that the use of the ripple network concept in a decentralized setting would have significant economic implications. This would shift tens of billions of dollars in profit from credit card companies to individuals. Individuals would be able to make payments directly with each other without needing to go through a central intermediary like a credit card company.
Furthermore, he suggests that the ripple network would reduce the cost of short-term loans by providing a highly competitive market in which people could request and receive lines of credit. This is because the decentralized nature of the ripple network would allow for a greater number of lenders to participate in the market, increasing competition and driving down interest rates. Overall, he is emphasizing the potential power of decentralized networks like the ripple network and links to a live implementation to the concept he was speaking about. I clicked it and it brought me to one of the first versions of Ripple in 2012 with 4500 network users. Using this link I was able to dig deeper and find the very very first version of the Ripple website dating back to March 2006. This led me to find the initial Ryan Fugger Ripple white paper from 2004.
“This is the power of the Web—people-powered finance through ripple networks and decentralized payments.”
Additionally, I learned about W3C's Payswarm initiative, which was a proposed open standard for the secure and efficient exchange of digital assets and payments on the web. This initiative was being developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Payments Working Group, which aimed to create a technical framework that would enable web-based payment systems to inter-operate seamlessly and securely. But I cant seem to find anything after 2014 so I think it died or had a name change. If you go to https://www.payswarm.com/ it redirects to a W3C Working Group.
Reading these articles from 10 years ago made me realize just how much progress has been made in the field of digital payments and blockchain technology. It's exciting to see how far we've come and to think about the potential for even further advancements in the future. It's clear that the Ripple Trust Network concept and other W3C Initiatives are transforming the way we think about money and payments, and I'm excited to see where this technology takes us in the next 10 years.
“How Crypto Currencies Transform Money” | X.com
April 27, 2012 by Manu Sporny
This is a very interesting read that provides insight into some high-level thinking of the X/Paypal crew around FIAT & cryptocurrencies back in 2012! The article breaks down the problem with FIAT currencies and how we moved from a silver/gold backing of currency to nothing backing the dollar. It also explains the centralized concept with central banks that control the money printer.
They state:
“It truly is a remarkable leap of faith that we make. The US dollar has worth because it is backed by the US government and therefore is backed by its people…”
They have a great breakdown of some character traits regarding a “trustworthy cryptocurrency” which can be still used today. They talk about Bitcoin being in the “Tens of Millions of Dollars” – what a throwback!
The ending of the article talks about moving toward “National Crypto Currencies” that sound like Central Bank Digital Currencies, an innovation that we have been witnessing the adoption of for the last couple of years:
“A fiat-based crypto-currency could operate alongside these other services as an alternative technology-based mechanism for money transmission. The liabilities—like those held by most banks, credit card companies, and money transmission services—would fall squarely on the companies providing the software to use the crypto-currency.”
Manu explains that to replace cash, it is necessary to have open crypto-currency standards, and that developing nations may be the first to make the switch since they are not politically influenced by the banking and finance sector to the degree that more developed nations are (cough in 2022, SEC Gov). Other nations may choose to adopt crypto-currencies in order to increase the efficiency of their market, thus giving them a competitive advantage.
“Open Web Payment Standards and the New Economy” | X.com
Written May 11, 2012 by Manu Sporny
This article is important, as it talks about “Open Payment Stands” for the Web and how the W3C could open up the “ivory tower of finance and banking” to the general public. Their goal is to create a more transparent, competitive, and fair financial system. They list important things about open payment standards and talk about the world’s first universal payment standard for the Web, which they call a solution called “PaySwarm”. This named solution is no longer around, and I have not figured out what has happened to it yet.
“The Crisis of Money and Its Metamorphosis” | X.com
April 10, 2012 by Manu Sporny
This is a very important article that everyone should read to really get an understanding of cash (FIAT) and the transformation happening with the global monetary system. This article contains a lot of value:
“The past several years have not been kind to the world’s working class and working poor. The foundations on which we have built the institutions of commerce—the markets, the banks, and government—have proven to be less reliable than we had believed, resulting in a wave of monetary crises around the world. Each was met with our brightest national leaders scrambling to correct the instability through obscene injections of capital and massive creations of debt on behalf of the peoples of this world.”
It talks about being the time to put forth a plan that uses the web, the best communication platform that we have today, to solve our collective monetary crisis. The article then explains the understanding of how we arrived in this predicament and examines the purposes of debt, money, and banking. It goes and talks about debt and the financial system in the early years of global society and how banks have shifted and taken over the economic system. They describe “The Web as an Engine for Innovation” and talk about “Rethinking the Foundations of Money”
They also talk about “Ripple Trust Networks” powering people's credit.
“The Future Money & The Web” | X.com
May 18, 2012 by Manu Sporny
This is another great informational article where they talk about the concept of “a ripple”, a trust network, and how we could change the way we provide loans and credit - it talks about how cryptocurrencies are poised to replace physical money. He talks about the web as a lifetime depository and how to standardize digital wallet, with it one day coming in place so you can access it from anywhere.
It also explains how finance is shifting to the web as fintech can innovate faster, using the web base architecture, then traditional banks, and credit card networks. They state in this article, at the time of writing, that there were 2 billion people who use the web. In 2022, there are now around 5 billion people who have access to the web.
“Perhaps the Web’s biggest contribution to our lives has not been the technology itself, but rather a new way of thinking about how we work together to solve the most pressing problems of our time.”
“The Future of Commerce Will Combine Your Social Network and Mobile Device” | X.com
This was from September 21, 2012, written by Nick Hughes. In this article, they discuss:
“If Those Two Powerful Phenomena Merge, Will We Discover a New Payments Utopia?”
They also state:
“Facebook and Twitter, together making up more than a billion socially connected web users, have positioned themselves well for the possible next phase of commerce. Facebook, for instance, recently reported now having 955 million monthly active users and 552 million daily active users. It also said it had 543 million active mobile users, who are much more engaged than its PC users”.
It was also stated that Facebook had over 11 million business profiles! This means in 10 years, as of 2022.
Facebook has 3 billion monthly users and 2 billion daily users, with over 200 million Facebook business pages. In 2012, Twitter celebrated its 6th birthday while also announcing that it had 140 million users and 340 million tweets per day. Today those numbers are at 450 million monthly active users and around 500 million tweets per day. This article also talks about combining a user ID with a mobile device ID and connecting a secure payment credential, thus having one quick checkout – online or offline.
These are the last two important statements I want to point out, then picture what Elon Musk is doing today:
“Now imagine if instant and automatic transactions were coded into those sorts of buttons, allowing the user to transact with a securely stored payment credential on a third-party server in just one click from his or her mobile device.”
“If you are developing a mobile payment platform, it only makes sense to consider the imminent power of social sharing and how it will enhance the commerce experience for people around the world.”
It’s neat to see how social media is exponentially growing and connecting citizens of the globe. I wonder what life is going to look like, reflecting on this, 10 years from now! They also use a great example of “How Facebook Could Transform the Mobile Commerce Market”.
The Bottom Line…
There is now no doubt about it – we are at the start of a new era of payments and social media. This plan has taken over 10 years to come to fruition, and I am so thankful I am doing my homework now, before the transformation has taken place.
In conclusion, I hope that my research on the connections of the past has provided an interesting and insightful look at the developments that have shaped the current landscape of freedom of speech and payments. As we enter a new era of technology and innovation, it is important to embrace the opportunities and challenges that come with it. The clock is ticking and the whole world is asleep thanks to mainstream media, but it is up to us to awaken and embrace the potential of this moment in time. I hope you have enjoyed reading this edition of the Genfinity's LightHouse Report, and I look forward to sharing more insights and perspectives with you in the future.
Never stop learning and never stop improving!
Sincerely,
