21 in 21： Jack Dorsey

Hi there, this is 21 and 21, a rapid-fire Q&A show filmed at Presidio Bitcoin, the Bay Area's first Bitcoin coworking and event space. I'm Haley Burko, and I ask visitors who have stopped by Presidio Bitcoin 21 questions in 21 minutes. It's okay if we don't get through them all, we'll do our best. Today our guest is whoever this guy is. I've got my clock right here and it's ready to go. Jack, once I hit the button, it's go time. Are you ready? I'm ready. Okay. I don't know what I'm ready for, but I'm ready. What brings you to Presidio Bitcoin? This interview. What are you working on right now? Right now? We're doing a ton, but it's mainly block-related. Are any of the things that you're working on important to Bitcoin's future and why? I believe so. We have a team working on mining, an open-source mining rig and chipset. We have a team working on BitKey, which is a self-custodial wallet. And then we have our Bitcoin exchange business within CashApp. And we're just looking at ways to better integrate Bitcoin with everything that we do, because it helps our business. If we have an open protocol for money transmission that works on the internet anywhere, we can build our business everywhere, whereas today that's just not the case because we need a partnership with the bank. So all these things are very, very good for us and I think good for Bitcoin as well. How did you become a Bitcoiner? I followed the alt-cypherpunks pretty early. I was very interested in the open internet and Usenet and cryptographers and applied mathematics. Early on, I was a big follower of Adam Back and what he did with the four lines of Perl, exporting PHP. It was a very cool, wild world and the dream for that group was always money and money transmission. When we started Square at the end of 2008-2009, the white paper had just come out and I just thought it was brilliant. It was poetic. And we were just about to get in the mix with the credit card networks and the banks and whatnot, and that this was another path and someone was thinking about that. And there was a movement around it that connected the dots with the alt-cypherpunks for me. It felt amazing early. What are you currently most excited about in the Bitcoin space right now? Mining. Our team's mining rake. I just think it's important. I think it's another point of centralization that we can help diminish and further decentralize. We'll have our system, but I'm excited to see what other people build with it and how they customize it. What do you consider the most Bitcoin project of Bitcoin today? Bitcoin Core. Just the work that that group does, the deliberateness, the adversarial thinking they have to do on a regular basis. I think it's the most important and the most complicated. I just have a huge amount of respect for that collection of individuals. Let's fast forward to the future and Bitcoin has failed. How did it fail? I think it fails through irreverence. It fails to be relevant to people on a daily basis. If it just ends up being store of value and nothing more, I don't think it gains relevance at all. I think it has to be payments for it to be relevant on the everyday. Otherwise, it's just something you buy and forget and only use in emergency situations or when you want to get liquid again. I think if it doesn't transition to payments and find that everyday use case, it's increasingly irrelevant. That's failure to me. What do you think that we can do to mitigate that risk that led to failure? I think building simple, accessible experiences that solve the payment use case, making it scale, making it fast, giving the speed of the Visa and MasterCard networks real competition. I think all that changes. There's tons of projects to do that and that continues to increase in privacy and security and ultimately safety. It gives you a third option. I think we always want a third option to the US dollar, to the Chinese Yuan. Having a third option for currency I think is important and it keeps the other currencies in check and governments in check as well. Bitcoin is quite volatile. How do we get people to use Bitcoin as a currency despite the volatility? Well, it's volatile. It's only 16 years old, 17 years old. I think on that time frame, anything that's getting started is going to look volatile until people really understand it better and understand the use cases and have a different relationship with it. We all remember when we were 16 years old as a little bit of a wild time and I think that's expected. I think it's just going to take time. It's just continuing to make it more accessible, continue to make it easier, continue to make it more private, lean into the things that brought us all here in the first place and those principles. I think more and more people will turn their attention towards it. What's your most controversial Bitcoin opinion? I don't know if it's controversial, but I think we can do better than Lightning. It's not that Lightning is bad. It's just challenging. Bitcoin is an incredible layer one and I don't think we just want to settle with having one layer two. I think we need to experiment a whole lot more and have different alternatives and play around because we never know what's going to stick and there might be different use cases that each of these layers, alternative layer two solves for in a better way. Having more choice rather than just being religious about one I think will be best for Bitcoin and best to meet people where they are in terms of how to actually use it for a daily use case. This might be related to the answer you just gave me, but what's your dream project that you would like to see Bitcoiners build? The intersection of AI and agents, I think there's a lot there and I don't think we've explored enough. It's obvious that agents will be a part of our future. It's obvious that we'll give them agency to transact for us. Do we want that to again be in this corporate owned financial network or do we want a financial network that the internet owns and is a layer on top of the internet? I think we want the latter and I think we can build a lot more interesting applications within AI if we have that and we don't need, it's all about who you're asking permission from, right? And development goes faster if you have to ask for less permission and that's the beauty of Bitcoin is I can build anything I want on top of it and I think what we need to see more of is that same sort of thinking applied towards media which Nostra I think is helping to solve and intelligence which we don't have enough energy around yet. So I think that intersection is very interesting. I think the media in Bitcoin and social media in particular and Bitcoin intersection is interesting and I would love to see more projects there and more experiments. What's your perfect Sunday? Perfect Sunday? A day to reflect, walk. I love walking in nature, so long walk. Be able to reflect on the week past and the week ahead and I love learning as much as I can so I spend a lot of it reading and researching. What's the best way for companies to support the Bitcoin open source ecosystem? Well I mean Spiral opened a playbook for creating your own spiral in a box and I think having more companies do that I think is important. Having some sort of grant, granting ability to open source developers is important that are not, that don't exist within your company. If you don't want to handle that yourself there's great organizations like Brink and OpenSats and HRF that you can donate to and they'll do the work and they have a pretty rigorous process to choose who gets grants and how much and if they're recurring, if they're long term. There's a bunch but it comes down to like funding and funding open source developers to do what they think is best and they think is right. Do you think that institutional investment determines whether Bitcoin becomes the planet's preferred currency? No, it probably harms it a bit but I think it's obvious that we'll see more of it and I hope that more people take on the principles of what made Bitcoin successful in the first place which is open source, open protocol and it's not something that can just be frozen in time and said okay we're done, we built this protocol. We're not done. There's tons of stuff we need to do to really get back to the white paper which is a system for electronic peer-to-peer digital cash. We have not seen that yet. We've not lived up to that potential and I think we're still pretty far away from it actually. What do you think the role of stablecoins should be? I don't know. I do see them as potential good on-ramps for Bitcoin. I think they do have use cases. I worry about in any of these things one corporation or a few corporations owning the full stack of them but I think they have use and I think they make Bitcoin more accessible but I just question how some of them are being built and if we can build them in a more open protocol, unowned, permissionless way than what we've currently seen. I think the answer is yes but it remains to be seen. What is happening today that gives you the most hope for Bitcoin's future? Presidio Bitcoin. I think this is great because it is a bridge between Silicon Valley and all the energy down there and Bitcoin and in San Francisco and this tech scene which is not going away. It's only going to increase. So there is something in the water here and having physical placement that makes Bitcoin more tangible to that world I think is important and necessary but it's one thing. I think there are more and more organizations getting into Bitcoin open source funding and development and there's more energy around it and everything seems to be in flux right now. It feels somewhat chaotic but those are always times that massive amounts of creation happen and I think people are at least questioning everything whether that be negatively questioning or positively. They're questioning and that I think always leads to better outcomes. Who are some of your favorite Bitcoiners working in the space right now? Steve Lee. There's a bunch of people. The whole Spiral team I think has been amazing but it's the people that were, I don't know their identity and I don't know who they are, that contribute to Bitcoin Core around the world and do really really thankless work and get tons of critique all the time but still put in the code and do the work and Bitcoin is better for it and they don't want credit and they don't want to be known and they don't have identity and I think that's still who, those are my heroes. The people who have that sort of approach. How many Satoshi t-shirts do you own? Two now. I have a long sleeve one and I have a short sleeve one. I doubled my Satoshi t-shirt. Metric. How do you think that we can convince ordinary people like the moms and the dads that Bitcoin is in fact safe? I think they have to feel it themselves. I don't think any matter of education or talking or videos or even podcasts like this, sorry, is going to change minds. They have to feel it and we've been trying to do this with BitKey because it's like this physical rock and you feel it and it's like solid and I think we just need more of that. I don't think the feeling of safety or that convincing someone that Bitcoin is safe is the problem. I think it's what do I use this for? It goes back to like is it just digital gold and I put this thing and I forget? Okay, done. But like that's it's just not enough for me. So showing use cases and like you get out of the US, you get out of this bubble, you get out of Europe, you get down to Central America, South America, Africa. I've spent a lot of time in those continents and people are using Bitcoin to buy coffee and they're using it to buy dinner and they're using it to pay vendors and those vendors are going to restaurants that accept that Bitcoin and there's tiny little circular economies happening and that gives me a lot of hope and they're not talking about the price. They're actually using it on a regular basis. What's happening on NostraWiz apps is the largest at scale implementation of internet magic money that we've been talking about for decades that's actually paying for content and it's working at scale. It's small scale but it's still at scale. So these are things that like we need to study more and learn from and like those are the reasons why people get in and those are the reasons people will stay ultimately. So it's again, you have to feel it and like we haven't given enough opportunity to actually feel the magic. What advice would you give to people who are new to the Bitcoin space or are thinking about jumping in? Don't overthink it, just play as much as possible. There's a ton of choices, there's a ton of ways to experiment, there's a ton of ways to see the space and contribute to it and you know, don't follow any one path because you think it's right. Follow it because like there's a gap and you want to see it in the world and you want to build it and you know, only good will come from that. So yeah, play and experiment as much as possible. So this is our last question. You're doing a great job at getting all 21 questions in 21 minutes. I can really expand on this one. You can really expand, you got a whole three and a half minutes. If you could leave our listeners with a single thought about Bitcoin. Single thought about Bitcoin? Don't listen to anyone's single thought about Bitcoin. Like what makes Bitcoin special? What makes things like Nostra special? Is there a permission list? You don't need anyone's permission to build what you want to see and that's just incredible. Like to be able to work on a money transmission protocol that's entirely open, that has no one leader, that has all this attention, that has converted the likes of BlackRock or these major institutions that were these things that we railed against in the past and now they have to turn their attention to it and yet you still don't need their permission to build on it or to change it or to better it. Where else can you find that? Like at that scale, not nowhere and in only 16 years. So imagine the next 16 years and how you can contribute to it. Again, only asking yourself permission like that. It's just an incredible thing to be a part of and it reminds me so much of the earlier and that where again the default was you didn't need permission to do anything. We see more and more of that going away and Bitcoin and Nostra and hopefully something in intelligence will be the antidote to that and bring us back to like what made the internet special in the first place, what made it magic. So permissionless, that's the one thought, one idea. A great lasting thought. Well, that's all I have. Thank you so much for coming on the show today and to stop by Presidio Bitcoin. We're really excited to have you here. Great to be here. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you.