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Bitcoin

Dorsey Says Zuckerberg Should Have Focused on Bitcoin, Not Diem (bloomberg.com) 47

Posted by msmash from the carpe-diem dept.
Block Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey criticized Meta Platforms' failed cryptocurrency project, Diem, saying the company's time would have been better spent focused on advancing Bitcoin. From a report: Dorsey said Tuesday that Meta's approach to Diem, a proposed cryptocurrency formerly known as Libra that came to an unceremonious end this week, wasn't open enough. Instead, Dorsey says Meta was too focused on driving people to its own suite of products, like WhatsApp and Instagram.

"They tried to create a currency that was owned by Facebook -- probably for the right reasons, probably for noble reasons -- but there were also some reasons that would indicate trying to get more and more people onto the Facebook ecosystem," Dorsey said Tuesday at the MicroStrategy World conference. "They did that instead of using an open protocol and standard like Bitcoin. Hopefully they learned a lot, but I think there was a lot of wasted effort and time," he added. "Those two years or three years, or however long it's been, could have been spent making Bitcoin more accessible for more people around the world, which would also benefit their Messenger product and Instagram and WhatsApp."
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Dorsey Says Zuckerberg Should Have Focused on Bitcoin, Not Diem More

Dorsey Says Zuckerberg Should Have Focused on Bitcoin, Not Diem

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  • false dilemma (Score:5, Insightful)

    by avandesande ( 143899 ) on Tuesday February 01, 2022 @03:41PM (#62227957) Journal
    How about neither?

    • Re:false dilemma (Score:4)

      by Darinbob ( 1142669 ) on Tuesday February 01, 2022 @04:57PM (#62228215)

      How about we stop having crypto topics on Slashdot too?

    • Ypu'd have to be insane to use bitcoin. The only way to have a stable currency with a low cost of secure transactions is to use a centrally controlled currency. Essentially an amazon gift card, but a face book gift card in this case, and one you could spend outside of facebook too.

      All prrof of work currencies are insecure and never ever can be secure. Look at Crypto51.com and you see most currencies can have transactions overwritten for $10 and even the giants like bitcoin are under $1M/hour (which is l

      • I'm not arguing you're wrong, but I'd love to see some sources purely for my own self education. Any you think would be useful that you care to share?

      • Ypu'd have to be insane to use bitcoin.

        Bitcoin wouldn't have let him magic a trillion $$$ out of thin air.

        (Diem didn't either, as it turned out, but at least he tried)

    • When you love something (like cryptocurrency), you should not hug it so tightly or it will die.

    • There is a reason Dorsey's company's stock has lost almost half its value since he announced the name change; their CEO is obsessed with a financial vehicle mostly useful for money laundering! That's not a good look for a payment processing company.

  • It's confounding to me how an alpha libertarian like him can also be such a staunch advocate of censorship.

    • This article is about crypto not the alt-right's false perception and misunderstanding of censorship.

    • I don't follow him closely, but I don't recall ever hearing about Dorsey staunchly advocating censorship.

      • They people claiming twitter, Facebook etc have censored speech don't understand the basics of free speech.

        • But but but Twitter is the new town square /s

        • People who say we don't understand free speech don't seem to understand that sites like Twitter are the closest things we have to a government on the Internet, so it's absolutely an infringement of human rights for them to censor.
          Kys, fascist

          • Looks like you failed to learn what government is in school. Best bone up a bit before trying to talk about what a government is or is not. A private company is not a government regardless of your myopic point of view.

    • Presumably a staunch libertarian like him believes that private property is not owned by "the people" and as such he can kick off anyone he likes off his platform because it's his property to do with as he wishes.

      It's amazing how many supposed libertarians here are actually crypto communists.

      Freedom to do whatever you like unless it's something I disagree with! Freedom of speech unless you criticise me! Freedom of association unless outs me in which case exercise of your rights is "canceling".

  • and "noble reasons" will never be associated with each other, and I'm surprised someone even tried to put those words together.

  • No specifics Jack (Score:4, Insightful)

    by jacks smirking reven ( 909048 ) on Tuesday February 01, 2022 @03:49PM (#62227981)

    At least in this article there is no mention of how to "fix" Bitcoin. Making it more accesible means giving it the attributes of a currency. Easy to obtain, easy to use with near instant and cheap transaction times. How do you do that with a protocol like Bitcoin at this stage in it's development without blowing it up and starting over? There is far too much capital invested into Bitcoin at this point that it will now forever remain a speculative investment vehichle. Too many wealthy people have too much to lose for it to ever become what it was sold to be.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by sapgau ( 413511 )
      But how do you resolve the conflict between establish fiat currencies and their government support vs. allowing a virtual currency being exchanged freely worldwide without middlemen or agencies taking their share.

      • But how do you resolve the conflict between establish fiat currencies and their government support vs. allowing a virtual currency being exchanged freely worldwide without middlemen or agencies taking their share.

        I would use a question mark.

      • But there are middlemen when you do regular currency transactions (well, except maybe the government itself). Or have I read your post wrongly? It seems that BTC and other cryptocurrencies at least have the potential even at this point for direct P2P transactions if you're patient or have the time to burn. When I dabbled in satoshis that odd decade or so ago (mainly from pay-to-click sites), transactions were fairly fast, faster than anything I'd expect from a money transfer or even a credit card.

      • Re:No specifics Jack (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Darinbob ( 1142669 ) on Tuesday February 01, 2022 @05:03PM (#62228237)

        You can't. The exchange rates are not set by governments anyway, but by banks. So you may as well ask "how can we force banks to exchange between currencies and do complicated transactions with zero fees?"

        And just say "currency" or "national currency". Repeating "fiat" all the time seems like one is trying to push the crypto propaganda that it could all fail suddenly overnight so may as well use bitcoin.

        Bitcoin is the worst designed cryptocurrency anyway, it's like it was designed to be inefficient at being an actual commonly used currency. The only way to make bitcoin succeed is with exchanges so that no actual blockchain transactions need to be done merely to buy a cup of coffee. But an exchange is just another bank, which means fees, because employees need to be paid.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Xenna ( 37238 )

          How out of touch are you guys?

          "Bitcoin is the worst designed cryptocurrency anyway, it's like it was designed to be inefficient at being an actual commonly used currency."

          Absolutely, but very good as a secure store of wealth.

          "The only way to make bitcoin succeed is with exchanges so that no actual blockchain transactions need to be done merely to buy a cup of coffee."

          I just browsed this topic at '0', and there's no mention of lightning? You must be kidding me. If what you're saying is true, how is it possib

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Xenna ( 37238 )

            Cool, moderated as a troll. Let me tell you youngsters about the time when this site was all about technology and its applications. Good times, they were.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by nagora ( 177841 )

          You can't. The exchange rates are not set by governments anyway, but by banks.

          They're not even really set by banks. If the Bank of Turkey and the Bank of Japan get together to agree an exchange rate there is nothing much they can do to enforce it if Japanese people simply don't want to buy things using Turkish Lira. Exchange rates are about two people who need each other's currencies for trade.

          Crypto is a disaster generally and achieves none of the stated aims. Bitcoin is probably the worst but that doesn't imply the existence of a good one.

      • This is like asking, "How can I have a cake that tastes great, has no calories, and is still there after I eat it?"

        There is no "conflict" between having managed currencies and regulated middlemen taking their share. It is part and parcel of having useful fiat currencies. If you want to lower the fees, you'd have to put the government directly in charge of being the middleman, and that is unlikely to be efficient for a wide variety of reasons.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Thom34 ( 6232932 )

      Perhaps you haven't been following up the development around the Bitcoin. It has got second level network (Lightning), where transaction costs are below 1 cent and execution speed around 1 second, and the Jack just announced [techcrunch.com] that Block's CashApp is integrated to it.

  • It's volatile and slow, making a currency like that more accessible does a service to no one, except for enriching the pockets of those who currently hold BTC. It's just one more reason after the other to try and prop up the price of BTC.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kiuas ( 1084567 )

      Exactly. The entire crypto-space is a massive speculative bubble essentially propped up by hype. For long the only 'use' of Bitcoin outside of speculation was internet black market sales because people (mistakenly) believed it'd be anonymoys, even though it's not. Since the BC will have to be exhanged for a regular currency, tracking down the identities of people via the exchanges is pretty trivial. So now that even that usecase is pretty much out of the window (even though obviously there are other cryptos

    • I'm already getting modded down by BTC fanboys

  • They both allow private actors to dictate your resources, track you, and consume country-scale levels of energy. But gotta pump those virtual numbers! Because while nothing of value was created, we sure used a lot of electricity to show that this string address "owns" the some other numbers! Wait... I've seen this dilemma before.
    Sell nothings with marketing, hot potato to the greater fool, make out like a bandit. Oh.. right, pump-n-dumps.
    Still an inherent flaw in the faith that somehow oligarchs shoul

  • 1 Artificial Scarcity 3 Profit! (Score:3)

    by WillAffleckUW ( 858324 ) on Tuesday February 01, 2022 @04:19PM (#62228085) Homepage Journal

    This is like a very bad episode of South Park, except the underwear gnomes are stealing cryptocurrency, which has zero intrinsic value, if you're not Russia or North Korea or one of their pirates.

    • Right, underwear gnomes meet the mob and find out the profit is in laundry services!

      • No the profit is actually in taking deposits for laundry services.

        See, food delivery services are all running fake numbers, but none are actually profitable.

        So the profit is from creating a Laundry Service that takes deposits, and then fleeing to Cancun.

  • They tried to create a currency that was owned by Facebook -- probably for the right reasons, probably for noble reasons

    It was not for the "right" reasons, and it was not for "noble" reasons. That is not why Facebook does things. It's not in their DNA.

  • ...now we get to watch more than one scam fail, good content.

  • The guy with 2 jobs accusing others of a lack of focus.

  • "Bitcoin Fanboy Says Facebook Should Embrace Bitcoin."

    Also, "Phillip Morris Says We Should Smoke More"

    "General Motors Says We Should Drive More"

    "Budweiser Says We Should Drink More" ...and so forth.

  • Jack doesn't give a shit about Bitcoin, he's a died in the wool centralized fascist.
    All he cares about is having an easy way to launder money
  • Giving financial advice is exactly what I'd expect from the CEO of H&R Block.

  • Well... (Score:3)

    by Chas ( 5144 ) on Tuesday February 01, 2022 @11:25PM (#62229277) Homepage Journal

    I say that both of them should have focused on throwing themselves, feet first, into a 10,000 HP chipper-shredder rig.

    Do humanity a favor...

  • Dorsey and Zuckerburg should blow their brains out together.

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