While venture capital funds are leaving it to Elon Musk to figure out what to do with Twitter, presumably to gain a return on their investment, they apparently don’t have any suggestions as to what he might do.
Here is one from the days when Eric Schmidt was chief executive of Novell, then dominant in network management and the internet was in its infancy; turn Twitter into a banklike clearing house of secure digital identities (“Musk rallies his wealthy friends and true believers to raise Twitter cash”, Report, May 7).
The concept was this: your identity is verified using biometrics on your personal device, never centrally in a database. You then handshake your secure local identity with a Twitter identity vault where your profile is stored and linked to a virtual currency account. This vault issues transactional keys that allow secure digital entities registered in the vault to interact on the internet in commercial purchases and social interactions.
No personal information is given out, just transactional keys. This is a break with the Google advertising model where everything about you is given out.
The Twitter identity vault then bypasses the credit card system using blockchain and virtual currency. You can think of it as a system in which the seller of a product only knows what was ordered and where it is going, or the reader of a post knows it came from someone registered in a secure digital identity vault, not a spam machine.
How would Twitter make its money — the same way banks, credit card companies and stock trading companies do, by a small fee on each secure transaction?
Why didn’t this happen in the 1990s with Novell? Presumably because of the technological disruption of established business models. Enter Elon Musk.
Paul Fiondella
Former President Softel
East Hampton, NY, US