Block CEO, Robinhood CEO Scuffle on Twitter Over Bitcoin Fees

Vladimir Tenev let Jack Dorsey know that he can buy his beloved Bitcoin more cheaply on Robinhood. Also: SBF has some thoughts.

By Tim Hakki

Apr 16, 2022

3 min read

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is a fan of bitcoin and blockchain tech. Image: Shutterstock

Block CEO and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey had a brief back-and-forth with Robinhood CEO Vladimir Tenev on Friday.

Tenev tweeted on Thursday: “Can #Doge truly be the future currency of the Internet and the people? As we added the ability to send/receive DOGE on Robinhood, I’ve been thinking about what that would take.”

Over several follow-up tweets, Tenev riffed on improvements Dogecoin would need to become the internet’s top currency, adding that the blockchain, which currently handles around 40 transactions per second, would need to “significantly outperform” Visa’s 65,000 transactions per second.

As a comparison, Visa’s network can theoretically handle 65,000 tps. Doge would need to be able to significantly outperform Visa, which entails increasing throughput by at least 10000x. Fortunately, this is easy to solve simply by increasing the block size limit.

— VLAD (@vladtenev) April 14, 2022

Tenev concluded: “Dogecoin core devs, I would focus on one thing: coming up with a good process for increasing the block size limit over time. Let me know what you all think!”

The Bitcoin-pumping Dorsey replied to Tenev’s final tweet with an acerbic “u thirsty?” Tenev parried with “u mad?” before Dorsey exited the thread with “nah i’m good i don’t use robinhood.” Tenev got the last word:

you would pay less for your bitcoin if you did!

— VLAD (@vladtenev) April 15, 2022

'Sure, why not DOGE'

Vladimir Tenev wasn’t the only crypto industry pundit to consider popular DOGE adoption that day.

On Thursday, FTX CEO and co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried laid out a vision in which Twitter could be decentralized and monetized using Web3 technology.

Bankman-Fried said Twitter could charge a cent for tweets. He also suggested hosting ads on the user interface and using that revenue to pay network fees when tweets are sent. Seven tweets deep, he mentioned DOGE.

7) Because it would all be on-chain, it would be trivial to integrate the following into Twitter:

a) tips/payments/monetization for content creators

b) NFTs/profiles/avatars

c) sure, why not DOGE pic.twitter.com/btc8Dz0uUL

— SBF (@SBF_FTX) April 14, 2022

Bankman-Fried’s vision is, as he admits, “rambling,” and at times dystopian. His model gives Twitter’s communities their own powers of censorship. In addition, the FTX CEO suggested all tweets could be encrypted on-chain, with access to decryption permitted only by the tweeter, which, while it offers users more control, goes against the public forum style of Twitter, and, as Bankman-Fried himself said, blurs the line between tweets and DMs.

Besides, Dorsey beat him to the punch. The Block CEO first proposed decentralizing Twitter in 2019.

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