Messari Daily Brief Jan. 11, 2021 - Deplatforming the Prez

Big Tech’s coordinated de-platforming of a sitting U.S. President is disconcerting. But it’s not a hot take to say you’re relieved Trump has been banned from Twitter, Facebook, Shopify (!!!) et al for the duration of his term, while also maintaining concerns over what this means for free speech and the open internet. On the contrary: that feels like the consensus position.

Even if outliers help to showcase the state of democracy and the challenges tech monopolies face in the 2020s, Trump’s particular case hardly feels like a surprise to anyone paying attention. We already have de facto censorship thanks to cancel culture (see: NYT’s targeted attacks on Coinbase following Brian Armstrong’s “no politics” letter), and foreign adversaries' domestic influence in entertainment (Hollywood, NBA). And we definitely have norms around free speech limitations for those who foment hate and violence. The thing is, courts have been fully replaced by online mobs, private tech giants, and the CCP.

Bitcoin (and crypto) doesn’t actually fix this. Though a combination of crypto and regulation might.

I have frequently pointed to Albert Wenger’s brilliant-in-its-simplicity proposal to tie Section 230 protections for tech platforms to their provisioning of open user APIs. Though that might actually exacerbate the censorship problem.

Maybe a better option would be to pass legislation that ratchets up platform fines exponentially (1% of Mcap 2022, 2% in 2023, 4% in 2024, etc.) for tech’s failure to actually offer open APIs at scale. Imagine if you could port your Twitter data, Instagram data, Shopify data etc, tokenize it, and fully destroy and/or port it from Big Tech into a user-owned economy of dapps. Everyone would win. Most users would still opt for the hosted services and Big Tech would retain 230 protections even if they concurrently enforced their own terms of service; users would have choice and potential economics in new open platforms, and the emergence of legitimate decentralized apps would limit mass censorship. That wouldn’t solve the “mass misinformation” problem, but it might reduce misinformation virality and incentivize truth using economics.

Headlines that matter:

• INTEL (enterprise): Stacks mainnet (1/14); Voting on Cosmos’ Stargate
• The stampede is real: SkyBridge Bitcoin Fund investor call crashes (Decrypt)
• Counterintuitive, but possible: ETFs could cause a temporarily dip (CoinDesk)
• Morgan Stanley buys 10% of MicroStrategy, a new “side door ETF” (Decrypt)
• BlockOne's Larimer quits; EOS mcap now ~50% of B1’s treasury. (Decrypt)
• Sushiswap developers release 2021 roadmap (Medium)
• Wrapped BTC burns outpaced minting for BitGo in December (CoinDesk)
• Bitcoin Options hit $10 billion in open interest. (Decrypt)
• CZ: U.S. firms will IPO, crypto native firms will tokenize (The Block)
• Daily Shade: Bitcoin rug-pulled gold.

Join the 35,000+ industry professionals who read daily insights from the most experienced research team in crypto. Subscribe