Twitter and Substack have now officially integrated Bitcoin tipping and payment services through third-party partnerships with Strike and OpenNode, respectively
In the past month both social media giant Twitter and independent online publisher have officially integrated Bitcoin tipping and payment services through third-party partnerships: Twitter with Strike and Substack with OpenNode.
The two platforms which service a combined 350 million monthly active users, have both opted to offer Bitcoin and Lightning optimized API solutions.
Twitter and Substack’s Bitcoin integrations were announced and delivered around the same time as El Salvador became the first country to make Bitcoin legal tender. Many merchants in that nation now accept payment for goods and services in Bitcoin. From a game theoretical perspective, that nation has a first-mover advantage.
Importantly, after El Salvador made Bitcoin legal tender, the game-theoretic prisoner’s dilemma of national bitcoin adoption was initiated in global geopolitics. Famous whistleblower Edward Snowden highlighted that Bitcoin favors those that adopt it early, thereby putting pressure on other nations, which will be penalized for being laggards.
In any case, likely soon the first major social media platform will buy Bitcoin to hold in reserve. Square, Twitter, and Substack’s Bitcoin payment solutions give them a first-mover advantage in that space. They have indicated an understanding of Bitcoin and clearly value it as technology.
Over time, as these companies add Bitcoin to their balance sheets, yield enormous profits denominated in fiat terms, and carry out seamless, instantaneous, commission-less cross-border payment solutions with lightning integrations, it will elicit responses in the form of Bitcoin products and payment solutions from the world’s mega-companies, such as Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Facebook.
