Here’s a simple way to take over Twitter for way less than $43 billion dollars.

For reference, this is a vampire attack, perhaps best popularized by SushiSwap.


The creators on Twitter are the liquidity providers, the lurkers are the users. It’s hard to create a new platform because you need both to move at once. Here’s a simple way to solve that.

Step 1: Make a clone of Twitter on a blockchain, TWITCHAIN, with a native currency of TWITCOIN. Make the UI clean and responsive. 6 months of engineering work for 5 good engineers. Back TWITCOIN with $1B in buy orders.

Step 2: Create a browser extension that watches while someone browses Twitter, and puts any tweets they see on the TWITCHAIN. If you provide an unseen tweet to the chain, you get TWITCOIN. 100k people would install this, and you’d scrape Twitter quite quickly.

Step 3: Reward Twitter creators based on likes and retweets with TWITCOIN. 10x the rewards if you post through the TWITCHAIN front end (which also posts to Twitter). Tons of creators would migrate for the FREE MONEY!

Step 4: Also reward likers and retweeters, assuming they link their Twitter account and use the TWITCHAIN front end to take the action. Even lurkers will use TWITCHAIN front end because it doesn’t have ads and fake “trending” topics. It’s like nitter, but responsive because you didn’t cheap out on the cloud bill and with FREE MONEY!

Step 5: Watch the “liquidity” flow quickly from Twitter to TWITCHAIN.


Enjoy your new shiny Twitter. Hold half the TWITCOIN and you’ll also make a ton of money with this.

Responding to the HN doubters: With TLS verification captured by the extension it’s easy to confirm that any scraped data is authentic. And Twitter does a lot already to prevent Sybil attacks, you also wouldn’t reward any accounts created after TWITCHAIN. While it’s easy to game many crypto things like this, I believe this is different since we are bootstrapping using Twitter.

(of course, the real truth of HN doubt is that anything is possible, because then they’d have to look inside and ask themselves the hard question about why they didn’t do it and instead just make a comfortable salary at FAANG while claiming nothing can ever change, and if it does it’s certainly not because you did it)

I would absolutely love to see this. I’m not a big scale person, and you have to go big with this and hit strong all at once. But I’m putting the idea out there for you, and you can pay me back in lulz of watching this happen. It would totally work.