Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who also happens to be the chief executive of crypto-friendly mobile payments company Square, appears to be under the impression that Bitcoin will overtake the world’s supply of fiat currency within ten years.
In an interview with the Times, Dorsey made the rather dubious proposition that some form of cryptocurrency, and probably Bitcoin itself, will shortly become the world’s dominant medium of exchange.
“The world ultimately will have a single currency, the internet will have a single currency,” Dorsey told the Times. “I personally believe that it will be bitcoin… probably over ten years, but it could go faster.”
Dorsey, whose recently invested in a company called Lightning Network that aims to solve problems with bitcoin’s slow processing times and wildly variable processing fees, conceded that Bitcoin “does not have the capabilities right now to become an effective currency.” But he added that “There are newer technologies that build off of blockchain and make it more approachable.”‘
The Wall Street Journal recently wrote that a joint Huawei and Oxford Economics had (very tenuously) concluded that the “digital economy” will be worth $US23 ($30) trillion by 2025, so to capture the entirety of this market as Dorsey predicts, bitcoin would need to gain a little more value than fellow crypto traveller John McAfee’s wild projection of $US1 ($1) million per unit. This would obviously require exponential growth, and soon, because the value of a bitcoin has plummeted over 50 per cent from its all-time high of nearly $US20,000 ($25,832) last year. So maybe Dorsey is being a little bullish.
One might also note that numerous critics like New York University economics professor Nouriel Roubini, who predicted the 2008 recession, have warned Bitcoin is a speculative bubble that could soon collapse. While other cryptocurrencies are taking off in its wake, in general the market is padded with a huge number of flops and rumoured scams, which is likely why Dorsey’s non-crypto company Twitter is reportedly planning on joining other tech giants like Facebook and Google in banning many cryptocurrency ads. Even if Dorsey is proven right, it’s probably an open bet whether the result would be “greater financial access for all” as he claims, or simply an opportunity for the worst aspects of Silicon Valley and big banks to feed off each other.
In any case, Dorsey doesn’t need to be right about crypto becoming the world’s dominant method of exchange to make a lot of money off it. A small slice of that digital economy is still a whole hunk of change.
[Times via TechCrunch]