Twitter and Square chief executive Jack Dorsey nailed his colours to the bitcoin mast today, when he told the Times of London that bitcoin would be the top currency in 10 years.
“The world ultimately will have a single currency,” said Dorsey. “The internet will have a single currency. I personally believe that it will be bitcoin,” he continued, adding that it would take “probably over ten years, but it could go faster”.
Dorsey was recently revealed to be a major investor in Lightning Labs, the start-up that has just launched a Lightning Network implementation that runs as a payment channel side-chain for the Bitcoin.
In November last year Square’s Cash app introduced bitcoin trading.
In additional comments he recognised that as things stand bitcoin fails as a means of exchange, telling the newspaper it “does not have the capabilities right now to become an effective currency”.
Dorsey explained: “It’s slow and it’s costly, but as more and more people have it, those things go away. There are newer technologies that build off of blockchain and make it more approachable.”
Dorsey is in London in his capacity as Square chief executive to promote the company.
Dorsey came under pressure last year when Twitter’s stock price fell to $16 as the micro-blogging platform failed to increase its active user base. A number of changes to Twitter, such as increasing the number of characters that can be posted and introducing a new “moments” feature, have helped to inject new life into the platform and its shares are now priced at $32.87. President Trump’s frequent Twitter interventions won’t have hurt either.
Crypto watchers will be wondering what Dorsey’s investments and most recent comments mean for Twitter and crypto. There were reports this week emanating from Sky News, a UK TV news channel, that Twitter planned to stop carrying advertising for crypto in as soon as two weeks’ time. Sky provided no source for its report.
Twitter has attracted a lot of crypto traffic with traders looking to it for real-time news on crypto assets. Entrepreneur and crypto fan John McAffee attracted derision before Christmas when he started making “coin of the day” posts, which his detractors accused of being “pump and dump” operations.
It remains to be seen whether Dorsey is able to influence the board and executive team to move Twitter in a more crypto-friendly direction.
If the Lightning Network starts to get traction (quite likely) and the volatility calms down (probably unlikely), keep an eye on what Twitter does next with bitcoin.
