Bitcoin and its underlying technology will shape the future of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, the social media platform’s chief executive, told a virtual conference on September 25.
“A lot of our value in the past was around content hosting. So we would host the tweets, the images and videos,” Dorsey said at the virtual Oslo Freedom Forum 2020, once again endorsing a decentralized social media standard.
“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,” the billionaire told Thor Halvorssen, president of the Human Rights Foundation.
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Dorsey’s revolutionary conceptualization of open, decentralized social media aims transform the company’s role as a “content hosting” platform, Business Insider reports.
Dorsey’s designated team, called BlueSky, plans to hire “five engineers and some folks” to build Twitter as an open protocol, similar to that which email operates on, and aims to offer an alternative to traditional, centralized social media platforms.
“Right now we’re in the phase of finding a leader for it, but this is a completely separate non-profit from the company,” he said. “This group will be tasked with building a protocol that we can use and everyone else can use.”
“You see this most fundamentally in bitcoin and in blockchain. The keys will be more and more in the hands of the individual,” he said.
Bitcoin is the largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, at almost $200 billion, according to CoinMarketCap.
Earlier this month, Dorsey told Reuters bitcoin is “probably the best” native Internet currency because it is “consensus-driven” and “built by everyone.”
Dorsey spoke to Reuters just as payments company Square, which he also runs, invited other cryptocurrency firms to join an “‘alliance” that will pool patents and preserve the industry’s open-source spirit. It is called the Cryptocurrency Open Patent Alliance (COPA).
