Jack Dorsey: Bitcoin Must Be Made ‘Intuitive’ to Succeed

Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter and CashApp, believes that Bitcoin is the “native currency of the Internet.” But for it to succeed in changing the way most people think of and interact with money, it must be made “intuitive,” Dorsey told Reuters in an interview, published today. 

Dorsey, whose wildly popular CashApp lets people buy and sell Bitcoin, said that his job is “to make [Bitcoin] easy for people to access, make it easy for people to understand and most importantly, utilize.” 

“The internet wants a [native] currency...and I think Bitcoin is probably the best manifestation of that thus far,” the Twitter CEO explained. And to increase its adoption, Dorsey suggested two directions in which Bitcoin must trudge forward to be successful. 

“One is just transaction times and efficiency. So making it cost-effective and making it time-effective,” he told Reuters. 

Here, Dorsey touches on a major pain point of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is expensive to use. The average cost of a Bitcoin transaction will today force a user to part ways with $2.5, per data from BitInfoCharts. Most domestic US dollar transactions cost nothing. Bitcoin is also slow. The average time it takes to send Bitcoin between addresses is 9.4 minutes, according to data published by Statista last month. 

And then second, and perhaps more importantly, Dorsey said that Bitcoin must be “intuitive to people; that they understand why they might use it, they understand where it is, and they can access it in a way that feels similar to just handing over paper cash.” 

Dorsey’s own CashApp makes Bitcoin relatively painless to buy; other companies, such as Revolut and Coinbase, also simplify things. Companies such as Zilliqa, Unstoppable Domains and the Ethereum Name Service all provide human-readable names, surpassing the need to copy-paste a long Bitcoin address. 

“We have to build the coin in such a way that it is as intuitive as fast and as efficient as what exists today and obviously goes beyond that,” said Dorsey.

In today’s interview, Dorsey banged the same drum he bonged about a year ago. Last October, he said that the Internet is like an “emerging nation-state,” whose national currency is “cryptocurrency and Bitcoin.”

And today’s exultation is but the latest time that Dorsey has praised the cryptocurrency. In April, he proclaimed the Bitcoin whitepaper to be “poetry.” And after a grand tour of the continent last November, he concluded that “Africa will define the future (especially the Bitcoin one)."