It is the year 2018. Jack Dorsey is the serial entrepreneur behind payments company Square and social media giant Twitter. And he says in the not-too-distant future, one ‘single currency’ will no longer exist. But there will be…Bitcoin.
"The world ultimately will have a single currency; the internet will have a single currency. I personally believe that it will be bitcoin," Dorsey told The Times.
Well, 2018 was the year the 1975 sci-fi epic Rollerball prophesized a one world corporate government with a global single currency. Who knows?
This isn't the first time Dorsey has endorsed the world’s number one cryptocurrency. During Square's fourth quarter earnings call, Dorsey said Bitcoin provides an “opportunity to get more people access to the financial system.”
Bitcoin, which runs on an open-source network of computers, was founded to provide a way for people to exchange value for little cost, circumventing the cost and oversight of banks and governments – or the enemies of freedom and privacy, as the apostles of cryptocurrency like to think of them.
Square has been exploring how it can provide its customers access to the cryptocurrency, which has just recently rebounded after a period of freefall in early 2018.
In November, a few weeks before Bitcoin hit an all-time high near US$20,000, Square said it would allow some of its users to buy and sell bitcoin on its Cash App. In January, the company said it was expanding the service for most of its users.
“Bitcoin, for us, is not stopping at buying and selling,” Dorsey told analysts. “We do believe that this is a transformational technology for our industry and we want to learn as quickly as possible.”
However, Dorsey conceded to the Times of London that several issues hang over the cryptocurrency, saying:
“It's slow and it's costly, but as more and more people have it, those things go away. There are newer technologies that build off of blockchain and make it more approachable.”