Speaking at the Oslo Freedom Forum, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey says Bitcoin and blockchain technology will usher in a movement that will transform the internet we know today into what it was originally intended to be.
Conducted virtually for the first time, the Oslo Freedom Forum is a global series event hosted by the Human Rights Foundation. In an interview, Jack Dorsey spoke of the important role that Bitcoin and blockchain technology share in transforming the internet into a decentralized platform where content can exist permanently. In the early days, the internet was actually more decentralized Dorsey says. But decentralization meant that content discovery was more difficult.
“But [what’s] difficult about decentralization was actually discovery- finding content, finding people that would be like-minded. And that is what Google represents: it’s centralizing the discovery problem. It’s what Facebook represents: centralizing a discovery problem. It’s what Twitter represents, as well:centralizing the discovery problem.”
Now that blockchain technology exists, Dorsey sees the potential in creating better discovery and financial tools based on a decentralized foundation.
“A lot of our value in the past was around content hosting. So we would host the tweets, we’d host the images, we’d host the videos. Blockchain and Bitcoin point to a future and point to a world where content exists forever, where it’s permanent, where it doesn’t go away, where it exists forever on every single node that’s connected to it.”
Dorsey says that Twitter will have to make a pivot as he sees a future that will no longer engage in content-hosting activities.
“We’re in the discovery business and we’re going to have a particular approach on discovery, which is healthy conversation. A healthy public conversation that seeks to help people understand what’s happening in the world, to have conversations about what’s happening and hopefully to solve problems together.
What that means ultimately is we need to become a client of something much bigger than us. We need to enable people to contribute to a public blockchain and we need to be able to enable people to be able to pull and see from that public blockchain as well.
And if we’re able to do that, it’s something that’s really powerful and something I think speaks back to the power and the original intent of what the internet could be, which is something that anyone in the world can access. Anyone in the world can make decisions around in terms of their engagement, in terms of what they own, in terms of what they see, in terms of what they share.”
Featured Image: Shutterstock/KanawatVector