In excellent news for Twitter shitposters like myself, the cursed bird app will now accept Bitcoin as payment, which means you can tip your favourite Twitter users with 0.0001 of a Bitcoin to shout their next coffee.
This article was first published on September 3. It has since been updated with current information.
Twitter’s Tip Jar is hardly a new feature, with users having been able to support their favourite digital creators with financial donations for a few months now. However, now you can do so with CEO Jack Dorsey’s favourite cryptocurrency: bitcoin. And everyone can get a tip, not just those considered creators.
The rumour of crypto tipping circulated earlier this month and was then seemingly confirmed with Twitter product lead Kayvon Beykpour quote tweeting app developer and researcher Alessandro Paluzzi’s speculation with a lightning bolt and a ‘soon’ emoji.
The feature is now open to everyone, but is rolling out to people on iOS first. Twitter says it plans to bring Tips to people on Android over the coming weeks.
When you enable Tips on your profile, you can now add your Bitcoin address.
You’ll know an account has turned on Tips if the user has the icon next to their Follow button. Tap the icon, and you’ll see a list of payment services or platforms that the account has enabled. The services available so far are Bandcamp, Cash App, Chipper, GoFundMe, Patreon, PicPay, Razorpay, Strike, Wealthsimple Cash and Venmo.
Strike is a payments platform built on the Bitcoin Lightning Network that allows people to send and receive Bitcoin. But it’s only available to people in El Salvador and the U.S. (excluding Hawaii and New York). People in the eligible markets will have to sign up for a Strike account and add their Strike username to receive Bitcoin tips over the Lightning Network.
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The move is hardly surprising considering @jack has long been a supporter of Bitcoin, so much so that his bio on the platform simply reads #bitcoin.
Heck, back in July, Dorsey went so far as to claim that Bitcoin — a cryptocurrency with some pretty questionable environmental impacts — could be the key to world peace. As you’d expect, this claim wasn’t backed by any sort of explanation as to how this could actually happen.
At a Bitcoin convention the same month, Dorsey claimed his “hope is that Bitcoin creates world peace”.
“The amount of cost and distraction that comes from our monetary system today is real, and it takes away attention from the bigger problems, some of the bigger problems that Elon [Musk] is trying to solve — like getting us to multiplanetary humanity,” he said at the conference.
“All these distractions that we have to deal with on a daily basis take away from all those bigger goals that affect every single person on this planet, increasingly so. It may sound a little bit ridiculous, but you fix that foundational level and everything above it improves, in such a dramatic way. It’s gonna be long term, but my hope is definitely peace.”
Just a month later, he tweeted that Bitcoin would unite the world.
#Bitcoin will unite a deeply divided country.
(and eventually: world)
— jack⚡️ (@jack) August 9, 2021