Twitter CEO predicts bitcoin will become global currency
Current timely and costly transactions should get faster, cheaper in theory
Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey believes the dollar, euro and yen may soon be ditched in favor of a single digital currency around the globe — and that may be bitcoin.
In an interview with the British newspaper The Times of London, Dorsey shared his belief that the world may adopt a single global currency “probably over 10 years, but it could go faster.”
“The world ultimately will have a single currency, the internet will have a single currency,” said Dorsey. “I personally believe that it will be bitcoin.”
After a meteoric rise in 2017 that bolstered the global fascination with cryptocurrencies and an explosion of rival cryptocurrencies, bitcoin as of Wednesday morning sat at $8,985 per bitcoin. The current price is less than half of its historic peak on Dec. 16, which was $19,343.
Dorsey has been backing startups in the bitcoin space. Last week, Dorsey was announced as an investor in a Bay Area startup called Lightning Labs, which seeks to make bitcoin transactions faster and easier by replacing the costly and time-consuming process of recording every transaction on the blockchain, a publicly viewable ledger verified by a network of thousands of computers.
Dorsey believes the slow nature of recording bitcoin transactions on blockchain makes it ineffective — but believes there will be change soon to fix that.
“It’s slow and it’s costly, but as more and more people have it, those things go away,” said Dorsey. “There are newer technologies that build off of blockchain and make it more approachable.”
While Dorsey is publicly excited about bitcoin, his companies have had mixed reactions.
Square, the mobile payments company Dorsey founded, expanded its feature of buying and selling bitcoin through its Cash app after a test trial
last December.
“We’re exploring how Square can make this experience faster and easier, and have rolled out this feature to a small number of Cash app customers,” said Square in a statement in December. “We believe cryptocurrency can greatly impact the ability of individuals to participate in the global financial system and we’re excited to learn more here.”
Meanwhile, Twitter is taking a harder stance on cryptocurrencies, not including bitcoin. Twitter announced earlier this month it will start banning many kinds of cryptocurrency ads, according to Sky News.