The reward for developing the application went from USD 1,000 to USD 10,000 in a few hours. The contest to win that reward would last for a period of 7 days.
Last June 14th, investor and former CTO at Coinbase Balaji Srinivasan announced that he would grant a reward of USD 10,000 worth of Bitcoin. The winner would be the person who could develop an application to export his Twitter followers to other social media.
One day earlier, Srinivasan started the contest by offering USD 1,000 worth of Bitcoin for the development of the application. Later, he noted that the reward for the application had increased to USD 10,000 worth of Bitcoin. The contest for the reward would last for a period of 7 days, and Srinivasan said that he would reserve the right not to grant the reward if no application met his criteria.
As the investor’s announcement thread shows, several users submitted their proposals. Although Srinivasan has not yet announced a winner, he stated that he could use part of the reward for tests of the application and the second and third place winners.
The investor specified that the application had to be an open-source, and able to take a Twitter API key and download all the followers of an account. Besides, he said that it had to classify users according to some criteria and send a direct message to 1,000 followers per day, the daily limit of direct messages on Twitter.
According to Srinivasan, those who wanted to compete for the reward had to develop three versions of the application. These would be an open source script version, a local application version, and a hosted web application version.
In his Github profile, Srinivasan explained the steps that developers had to follow to develop the application to export Twitter followers. He also specified the number of people who would pay part of the reward to the winner. For instance, Richard Heart, founder of the HEX token, promised to pay USD 2,000 of the reward.
Balaji Srinivasan’s Reason for Application Development
Srinivasan says that what motivated him to want to create such a tool is that many users want to leave Twitter to use media such as Ghost or Substack. For this reason, he considers that the ideal would be a tool that exports all the followers of a Twitter account to media such as the aforementioned, or an e-mail list.
The most striking is that several users stated in the announcement thread that the reward was unfair, considering that Srinivasan is a billionaire. They also said that a more generous donation was necessary for the development of the application to take place in the established period.
In recent days, the Twitter Bitcoin community rejected the changes to privacy on the social network. The microblogging platform reported that it had removed from the accounts the option that allowed citizens to prevent sharing their data for commercial purposes.
By Alexander Salazar
