Jack Dorsey, the chief executive of Twitter and Square, said bitcoin will become the single currency of the internet in the next decade.
"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 in London. It would happen "probably over 10 years, but it could go faster."
Bitcoin made headlines last year with a value that jumped twentyfold to about $20,000 before collapsing by more than 50 percent. The cryptocurrency, which is created by computers that run lengthy math equations and process transactions, traded near $9,000 on Wednesday.
Dorsey has become increasingly involved in cryptocurrencies, CNBC reported. Square's mobile payments app Cash began offering bitcoin buying and selling in most states in January. Dorsey also participating in a $2.5 million seed financing round for Lightning Labs, a start-up that seeks to make bitcoin transactions more efficient.
One of the difficulties with bitcoin is that transactions take a while to confirm, exposing them to possible cancellation because of wild swings in the digital currency’s value. Payments processor Stripe in January announced that it would end support for bitcoin because of its limitations as a medium of exchange. Meanwhile, other cryptocurrencies have appeared that have tried to improve upon bitcoin's original idea of processing transactions and recording them in an unalterable blockchain ledger.
Cryptocurrencies have lost value this year as regulators globally have cracked down on digital assets trading and initial coin offerings, the fundraising mechanism where startups sell digital tokens. The Securities and Exchange Commission sent a number of subpoenas to ICO teams it suspects are breaking securities laws.
Dorsey said payment processing companies such as Square need to help bitcoin greater acceptance, but the cryptocurrency "does not have the capabilities right now to become an effective currency," he told the Times.
"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," Dorsey said.
© 2024 Newsmax Finance. All rights reserved.