Elon Musk Wants Everyone To Pay To Use X, But Can You Pay In Dogecoin?

Dogecoin is once again in the spotlight with speculation that DOGE payments are coming to X (formerly Twitter) as the platform looks to charge users a fee to post and interact on the platform. This was made public by owner Elon Musk, who said that the move was made in an effort to make sure new accounts being registered on the platform belonged to actual people.

X Is Moving To Pay-To-Play

In a bid to combat the growing bot problem on the X (formerly Twitter) social media platform, Elon Musk has proposed that there be a small fee for users. This fee will supposedly make it more expensive for bot operators to create so many accounts at a time, thereby discouraging this concerning practice.

Musk confirmed this plan in an X post reply to X Daily News, which had first broken the news on the platform. According to the X Daily News post, the pay-to-play model would apply to new users on the platform, and they would be unable to reply, like, or bookmark a post unless this fee is paid.

Interestingly, this is not a new phenomenon as the social media platform had already begun to implement the policy in some regions. It is already in place in the Philippines and New Zealand. However, the social media platform is now looking to expand this rule for all new users.

Currently, new X users in the Philippines and New Zealand have to pay a small annual fee of $1 to access the platform. While this amount seems minute, it quickly adds up for bot operators who create thousands of new X accounts daily. The mission is that as it becomes expensive for these operators to carry out their activities, the number of bots being created will reduce drastically.

The regions in which the policy is currently in place were used to test out how effective it was to help reduce spam and improve user experience. With the proposed site-wide rollout, it’s safe to say that the tests were positive.

“Unfortunately, a small fee for new user write access is the only way to curb the relentless onslaught of bots,” Elon Musk said. “Current AI (and troll farms) can pass ‘are you a bot’ with ease.”

Dogecoin Payments To Be Implemented?

For years now, the expectation has been that Elon Musk will finally implement Dogecoin payments on the X platform but that is yet to come to fruition. Nevertheless, the Dogecoin community has not given up hope as X moves forward with its plans to operate as a payments platform, receiving money transmitter licenses from multiple US states.

Interestingly, X already allows cryptocurrencies on its platform, with the likes of Bitcoin being accepted as a method of tipping creators. However, there is yet to be any substantial payment use case for cryptocurrencies such as Dogecoin on the platform for things like payments for subscriptions and ad revenue sharing with creators.

Given that the fee required for new accounts to use X is so small, it is possible that Dogecoin payments will be employed at some point. This is because the cheap fees and the fast transactions of the Dogecoin networks make it an ideal payment cryptocurrency for small transactions.