Twitter Chief Dorsey wants to help bitcoin

Jack Dorsey — CEO of both Twitter and Square — hopes that bitcoin will one day be the internet’s native currency.

Dorsey made this statement during an interview with Elizabeth Stark of Lightning Labs at a fireside chat today at the Consensus 2018 conference in New York.

Dorsey revealed that grew up in St. Louis, MI in what he described as a “huge hacker community” and that the ethos he saw growing up helped shape him into the innovative CEO of two major tech corporations that he is today.

A major supporter of Bitcoin, Dorsey admitted that he didn’t understand the full implications of Satoshi Nakomoto’s white paper when he first read it but was nevertheless fascinated by what he did see in it.

Jack Dorsey, speaking to a crowd of cryptocurrency enthusiasts, showed he was completely in sync with their view that digital currencies are the way of the future.

“The internet deserves a native currency; it will have a native currency,” Dorsey, the chief executive officer of Twitter Inc. and Square Inc., said Wednesday at Consensus, a blockchain and cryptocurrency conference in New York City. “I don’t know if it’ll be Bitcoin or not,” he said, but “I hope it will be.”

This wasn’t the first time Dorsey had spoken fondly of digital currencies. The executive tweeted in 2016 that he would “love to see a digital currency thrive.” In his role at Square, he has helped promote cryptocurrency. In 2014, the payments company started letting merchants accept Bitcoin.

Later, he co-founded Square, a payment processing financial service, with Jim McKelvey, a glassblower and former employer of Dorsey’s. They developed Square as a credit card processing service, but Dorsey says the credit card aspect of things is incidental, saying the goal was to help merchants make a sale and accept payment in any way they could.

Dorsey said the main thing that changed for him was that community participation in Bitcoin increased. “It felt electric,” he said.

During a Cash App hack week in January 2018, Dorsey set a goal to build a system where using the cash cart on Apple Pay he could go across the street and buy a cappuccino in the cafe in the Twitter building using Bitcoin. He enlisted the help of his engineer Mike Brock on the Tuesday of the event, with only a few days left.

They ran into a deployment issue and missed the Friday goal, but achieved the goal on Tuesday the following week. After that they dedicated Brock to building Bitcoin within Square Cash, saying the feeling of solving the issue was “amazing.”

Dorsey moved the project away from being a simple payment device and more into buying and selling.

“We felt the buying and selling interface that existed at the time wasn’t simple enough and it didn’t really provide access to people in a way that we thought it could,” he said.

Stark cracked a joke that the Cash app was “the real Bitcoin Cash” which didn’t quite land, before bringing the conversation to how and why Dorsey applied his expertise to the Square Cash app, the P2P payment application for mobile phones.

“This technology is a fundamental shift to our world and can have so many positive outcomes,” Dorsey said at the Consensus conference, the biggest of about two dozen events during New York’s “Blockchain Week.” “We have to do the work to educate regulators and educate the SEC why this technology is important.”