In a surprising statement, Twitter CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey says that he believes that in 10 years or less everyone in the world will be using Bitcoin.
“The world ultimately will have a single currency, the Internet will have a single currency. I personally believe that it will be Bitcoin,” Dorsey told London news outlet The Times.
Although Dorsey believes that Bitcoin is still “slow and costly,” he strongly believes that “there are newer technologies that build off of blockchain and make it more approachable.”
It’s all the more surprising considering that Twitter shortly will ban all advertising regarding cryptocurrencies, following the lead of Facebook and Google in the matter.
Nevertheless, Dorsey is investing in a startup business, Lightning Labs, which saw $2.5 million in seed financing last week. The mission of the startup is to speed transaction times on the blockchain.
Dorsey’s focus on cryptocurrencies has increased of late. In January his other company, the payment startup Square, launched an app, Cash, that offers bitcoin buying and selling in most states.
Dorsey told the Times that payment processing such as the service offered by Square will be crucial for Bitcoin to become more widely accepted.
Dorsey acknowledged that Bitcoin’s current problem is lag. However, “as more and more people have it, those things go away,” he said.
“Bitcoin, for us, is not stopping at buying and selling,” Dorsey also recently told analysts. “We do believe that this is a transformational technology for our industry and we want to learn as quickly as possible.”
The valuation of Bitcoin over the past year moved from $1,000 to above $20,000. It trades at around the $8,735 now.
Google, Facebook pressure
The high praise of Bitcoin is especially newsworthy because last week Twitter said it will ban all cryptocurrency ads in two weeks, similar to actions taken by Google and Facebook.
In a January blog post, Facebook said that it would block “ads that promote financial products and services that are frequently associated with misleading or deceptive promotional practices, such as binary options, initial coin offerings and cryptocurrency.”
Google will ban crypto ads starting in June.
It appears as if Twitter was forced to ban crypto ads because of pressure from Google and Facebook, but the definitive answer remains unclear.
Also, it will be interesting to see if Twitter changes their stance or what else they do to implement blockchain technology into their business. Clearly, the CEO of Twitter believes Bitcoin is promising. Perhaps other big tech companies will follow suit.
Dorsey’s bold pro-crypto stance has sparked lots of conversation online, of course.
Two more reasons this isn’t 2014 …
1/ Jack Dorsey
2/ Peter Thiel#bitcoin— Alistair Milne (@alistairmilne) March 21, 2018
From Jack, Dorsey, who is @jack & CEO of @Twitter & @Square : “#bitcoin will overtake the dollar in importance as it becomes the single global currency of the internet within a decade”https://t.co/19tKY8DaRQ
— SusanPoole (@BitCoinSusan) March 21, 2018
