An interesting side effect of this will be identity verification via the existing KYC in payment networks. Given twitters known bot problem, the number of bluechecks will likely be muuuuch lower as real people start to pay for them, and the real people behind the identities have to pay for them instead of their PR staff running them, but this in turn will make them more valuable and meaningful.

I might have been less aggressive about the whole thing, but there is likely a future product for arbitrary affinity groups where you can create your own hierarchy of checks for your followers, where one could become a gold, silver, bronze (but likely driven by emojii) follower of some e-celeb, where the cred symbol means something in the local personality fanclub/cult. The nested version of these could become a kind of federated status between affinity groups, where one could display their affinities to selected networks, etc. I could snark all day about blue checks, but their status was the artifact of a time that has passed. In the words of Auden these handsome profiles, "own a world that has had its day."