Note I said &quot;or&quot; there. Decentralizing the infrastructure would make things cheaper and might give you revenue opportunity (and growth) that you wouldn&#x27;t have otherwise. For example, perhaps you get into the business of aggregating ad sales to downstream providers.<p>As for directly monetizing the APIs, one thought that springs to mind is charging for the firehose in a federated way. You could, for example, have a query endpoint that looks like this to guarantee standard issuance of data, identity and payment:<p><pre><code>  GET &#x2F;api&#x2F;v1&#x2F;status&#x2F;access
  { 
    &quot;payment_address&quot;: &quot;13kU1qPtM3WWXrNugWfRPNM1BniMQDw9Ds&quot;,
    &quot;rate_bytes_sec&quot;: 50000000, 
    &quot;ask_expires_at&quot;: 1444492687, 
    &quot;access_token&quot;: &quot;h458Yf301&quot;,
    &quot;ask_in_satoshis&quot;: 1000000,
    &quot;ask_window_secs&quot;: 3600
  }
</code></pre>
Make a payment to the address, then start querying at 50MB&#x2F;sec for the duration of your valid token (in this example, 2 hours):<p><pre><code>  GET &#x2F;api&#x2F;v1&#x2F;status&#x2F;h458Yf301
  { 
    &quot;payment_address&quot;: &quot;13kU1qPtM3WWXrNugWfRPNM1BniMQDw9Ds&quot;,
    &quot;payment_received_address&quot;: &quot;13kU1qPtM3WWXrNugWfRPNM1BniMQDw9Ds&quot;,
    &quot;payment_received&quot;: 2000000,
    &quot;access_expires_at&quot;: 1444499887,
    &quot;identity_screenname&quot;: &quot;kordless&quot;,
    &quot;status_data_begins&quot;: [
    ]
  }
</code></pre>
And yes, I&#x27;m proposing Twitter should use Bitcoin to monetize query traffic. Even better, charge people for posting lots of statuses, or following and unfollowing lots of people. Link ask price to signal&#x2F;noise ratio.