Could Twitter’s Best Value be as a Bitcoin Facilitator?

November 4, 2016 By: Steven Anderson

The social media circle is a strange place, and right now, Twitter’s fates aren’t looking all that great.

There may be a change afoot, however, as Twitter looks to a new potential source of value: making bitcoin a little easier to get into.

Right now, bitcoin isn’t exactly a user-friendly technology, and buying bitcoin is a tall order. Making bitcoin easier to get into could be a real coup, and some companies are working to make Twitter a useful trading post for the cryptocurrency.

One of the biggest efforts is coming from a company called iPayYou, who has a noteworthy new measure afoot.

Originally, iPayYou was using email addresses as the necessary front to route bitcoins through, but as many people consider the email address to be private information, a lot of people weren’t interested in handing that over.

So iPayYou considered information that was never meant to be private, and thus considered the Twitter feed. Basically, Twitter serves the purpose an email address would have, connecting to a bitcoin wallet and notifying users of payments made and received, all by tweet. A link in the tweet directs to iPayYou’s website, and several options are available from there, including the ability to convert bitcoins to US dollars as needed.

This is good news for bitcoin; if it’s truly to be seen as anything more than a payment mechanism for criminals, it’s got to be easier to get, easier to trade in, and there have to be places willing to take it. That’s the universal constant for any mobile payment system. While this may not be so great for dealing with retailers, it might be the absolute king of peer-to-peer payment systems, since Twitter has no shortage of users as it sits. Plus, with a clear new value for Twitter, it may be the recipe Twitter needs to recover its losses in the social media side of things.

Naturally, only time will tell just how well iPayYou makes the connection to Twitter, but this could be just what Twitter needs to get a shot of new life as not only a social media mechanism, but also as an excellent peer-to-peer service and way to make bitcoin more accessible.