I think it’s quite smart to launch this sans-crypto to avoid headlines, ensure the feature works well and is received well, and then add additional payment methods weeks or months later.<p>I do wonder if this hurts or helps twitter as a product tho - I can’t say I’ve been enjoying the recent “only so-and-sos friends can reply to this post” trend. But now we will see very popular tweets with no discussion allowed that is also earning money from sycophants? I can’t say that makes me excited to jump on twitter - although clearly this doesn’t sway a large number of users off Facebook either so maybe I’m not the target market here... it does seem strange though that after a decade of talk about social media bubbles, we seem to be reinforcing them explicitly!<p>At what point is a read-only tweet, shown only to those who already agree and which asks for donations, any different from televangelism? It feels about as alien to discussion (presumably the purpose of twitter) as one can imagine.