Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter and mobile payments company Square, appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience on Saturday for a wide-ranging discussion covering the global narrative on social media, Twitter bans, Periscope, tech innovation, cryptocurrency and Bitcoin.
Dorsey talked about free speech versus offensive conduct in the wake of accusations that he didn’t act fast enough to shut down hate speech on Twitter. He also gave his take on Bitcoin’s potential to become the world’s universal currency and why servicing people who don’t have access to banks and financial stability is critical.
Says Dorsey,
“You look at technologies like blockchain, for instance, and we’re moving to a world where anything created exists forever; that there’s no centralized control over who sees what; that these models become completely decentralized and all these barriers that exist today aren’t as important anymore…”
“I believe the internet will have a native currency and I don’t know if it’s Bitcoin. I think it will be, given all the tests it has been through and the principles behind it, how it was created. It was something that was born on the internet, was developed on the internet, was tested on the internet – it is of the internet.”
Key to CashApp’s success was sticking with it, especially in the beginning when team members saw it as a resource drain that wasn’t generating any decent returns.
“We were against all these incumbents like Venmo and PayPal, and it finally clicked because we had the patience and conviction around our belief.”
Although CashApp supports Bitcoin, Dorsey has no immediate plans to support other cryptocurrencies.
“We would love to see something become a global currency. It enables more access. It allows us to serve more people. It allows us to move much faster around the world. We thought we were going to start with how you can use [Bitcoin] transactionally, but we noticed that people were starting to treat it more like an asset, like a virtual gold. And we wanted to make that easy, just the simplest way to buy and sell Bitcoin.”
To help educate people about crypto, CashApp made a children’s book about Bitcoin. It also built in constraints to discourage people from day trading and purchasing Bitcoin with credit cards.
Dorsey says the road to longevity for innovations is being uncomfortable and disrupted. Reimagining money – “one of the last, big, centralized, nationalized instruments is currency” – is part of the disruption.
“What’s interesting about the internet is that it’s the whole world. The whole world. The world gets one currency. It gets one thing to communicate in, and that to me is so freeing and so exciting.”
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