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Jack Dorsey has left his position as CEO of Twitter, the company he helped found in 2006, to devote himself to the cryptoasset market. Or rather, bitcoin. Even before November 2021, when he announced his departure, Dorsey was already an active member of the crypto market, either through Square (now Block), which has accepted bitcoin since 2014; either as a developer or as an enthusiast.

Here you will read Jack Dorsey’s top 10 opinions and explanations about bitcoin, metaverse, and even world peace: 

Focus on Bitcoin, even when he was CEO of Twitter

In an interview given to Bitcoin Magazine on June 7, 2021 (which you can check here), just before he announced his departure from Twitter, Jack explained the importance of cryptocurrency in his career:

For me, Bitcoin changes absolutely everything. What attracts me most is the ethos, what it represents, the conditions that created it, which are so rare and unique and precious. I don’t think there’s anything more important in my life to work on, and I don’t think there’s anything more empowering for people around the world.

 Whatever I can do, whatever my companies can do to make Bitcoin accessible to everyone, is how I’m going to spend the rest of my life. If I wasn’t at Square or Twitter, I would be working on Bitcoin. If I needed more help than Square and Twitter, I would leave them to Bitcoin. But I believe both companies have a role to play, and I think anything we can do as companies to help find the right intersection between a corporate narrative and an open community narrative is the best.

But in 2014, it was a different story

In early 2014, Square started accepting bitcoin as a currency for transactions. At that time, however, Jack knew little about the crypto market, as he told at the Consensus conference in May 2018:

I didn’t understand the implications of bitcoin until three or four years ago [2014], when we had some engineers from Square [now Block] who wanted to build a system for accepting Bitcoin for their online store. So I said yes, it took about three or four months, and they did it so that any seller could accept Bitcoin without knowing that we were getting into Bitcoin.

Crypto and Business

As soon as he understood the whole concept, Dorsey started talking more openly to the public about the implications of bitcoin with business in mind. As he spoke about on this episode of Lex Friedman’s podcast , on April 24, 2020:

I’m a big believer in bitcoin because our biggest problem as a [Block] company is that we can’t act like an Internet company, open up a new market. We got to have a partnership with a local bank. We have to pay attention to the different regulatory environments for integration. And a digital currency like bitcoin takes a lot of that, where we can potentially launch a product in every market in the world because everyone is using the same currency. And we have a consistent understanding of regulation and integration and what that means. So I think, you know, the Internet continuing to be accessible to people is number one. And so I think the currency is number two. And that will allow for much more innovation, much more speed in terms of what we can build and others can build. And it’s just fascinating. So, I mean, I want to see that and feel that in my life.

On the possibilities of Bitcoin

The world will eventually have a single currency, and the Internet will have a single currency. I believe it will be bitcoin. That’s probably in ten years, but it could be faster.

Bitcoin > Ethereum

Every time Jack talks about cryptoassets, he is most interested in bitcoin. However, Ethereum, which has become increasingly in the spotlight because of NFT transactions, is not well regarded by Dorsey. The former Twitter CEO had criticized ETH a few times, but most directly on December 23, 2021, when he got straight to the point:

I’m not anti-ETH. I’m anti-centralization, VC fund ownership, single point of failure, and corporate-controlled lies. If your goal is anti-establishment, I promise you that [the way out] is not ethereum. So don’t believe or trust me! Just look at the fundamentals.

 Metaverse: controversy 1

The metaverse enters the list of hype topics that Jack Dorsey criticizes. On October 20, 2021, Twitter user @udiverseblack posted the following idea: “the word ‘metaverse’ was created by newal stephenson in the book ‘snowcrash’ and originally described a virtual world owned by corporations where end-users were treated as citizens in a dystopian corporate dictatorship. And what if neal was right”. Jack Dorsey, who was still CEO of Twitter at the time just retweeted this post with this comment: “NARRATOR: He was”

Web 3 for everyone

Web3, the term used to refer to a blockchain-based “next generation of the Internet”, is a new craze among US venture capital funds. The subject is so hot that funds like Andreessen Horowitz are creating focus groups to establish the protocols of the new Web paradigm. Jack Dorsey, in favor of total decentralization, said this about Web3 on December 21, 2021 on his official Twitter account: 

You don’t own “web3”.

VCs and their LPs do. You will never escape their incentives. Ultimately, it is a centralized entity with a different label.

Know what you are getting into…

In defense of developers

Staying tuned of the growing lawsuits in the crypto world, Jack Dorsey took a stand on January 11 of this year. Jack joined Alex Marcus and Martin White and created the Bitcoin Defense Fund; in an email to developers, he explained what the purpose of the fund is:

The Bitcoin community is currently the subject of litigation from many sources. Litigation and continued threats are having the effect they wanted: individuals choose to surrender in the absence of legal support. Open-source developers, who are primarily independent, are especially susceptible to ‘legal pressure’. In response to this, we propose a coordinated and formalized response to defend developers. The Bitcoin Legal Defense Fund is a non-profit entity that aims to minimize the legal headaches that discourage software developers from actually developing bitcoin and related projects, such as Bitcoin’s privacy protocols.

The fund’s goal is to defend developers from lawsuits relating to their activities in the Bitcoin ecosystem, including discovering and retaining lawyers for counsel, unraveling litigation strategy, and paying for legal fees. This is a free, voluntary option for developers to use if they need it. The fund will start with corporate volunteers and lawyers.

 Bitcoin & world peace

If taking the dollar’s place isn’t enough, Jack sees bitcoin with another great destiny in front of it. On July 21, 2021, Jack attended the B Conference alongside Elon Musk to talk about Bitcoin as a tool for economic empowerment (the full video of the conference is here, and it’s worth taking an hour out of your day to watch it). He spoke the following during the event: 

I hope that bitcoin will create world peace or help create world peace. 

We have all these unbalanced monopolies, and the individual is powerless. The cost and distraction from our monetary system today are real and take attention away from the bigger issues.

All these distractions that we have to deal with daily get our attention off the larger goals that affect every person on this planet and tend to affect further. You fix that fundamental level, and everything above it improves dramatically. It will be long-term, but my hope [with bitcoin] is definitely peace.