TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #61: Jack Dorsey

Episode Date: March 4, 2019

Join Marty as he sits down with Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter and Square, to discuss how Jack came to experiment with Bitcoin, the parallels he sees between Twitter and Bitcoin, dealing with pseudonymity on Twitter, how Bitcoin curbs the State, education in the Information Age, what it's like to be a part of the Casa node club, and much more. Thank you to this week's sponsors: Honeyminer is the easiest way to earn Bitcoin. A simple crypto mining application that uses your computer's CPUs and GPUs to mine cryptocurrencies and pays you in Bitcoin. Go to https://www.honeyminer.com today and start earning BTC now. Lolli lets you earn up to 30% back in BTC when you shop online. Shop from 750+ online retailers including Jet, Overstock, SeatGeek, Priceline, Hotwire, Walmart, CVS, Best Buy, GAP, Macy’s, Hilton, and Mariott and earn BTC via the Lolli extension. Head over to https://lolli.com/ref/tftc today!

Well, hey there, freaks. It's your boy Marty Bent here to introduce you to this week's sponsors, a couple of companies that love to help you stack sats. First up, we got HoneyMiner. HoneyMiner is the easiest way to earn Bitcoin, a simple crypto mining application that uses your computer's CPUs and GPUs to mine cryptocurrencies and pays you out in Bitcoin. Installing HoneyMiner is dead simple. One click and you'll be earning Bitcoin while you sleep. Download the app today at honeyminer.com. That's honeyminer.com. And if you want to help this podcast in particular out, go to stackingsats.com. That's our ref link. Currently available on Windows and Linux with Mac and Beta. It'll be available to all these operating systems in the near future.

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Sign up at HoneyMiner.com or stacking sats.com, whichever you prefer. Next up, you guys know all about this company as well, Lolly. Lolly will let you earn up to 30% back in Bitcoin when you shop online. We've been pitching that they have 500 plus merchants for the last few weeks. Guess what, freaks? That 500 has been raised to 750. There's now more than 750 merchants on the Lolly platform that you can shop from, including Jet, Overstock, SeatGeek, Priceline, Hotwire, Walmart, CVS, Best Buy, Gap, Macy's, Hilton, Marriott.

uh the basically by shopping online via lolly with these companies you get a cash back deal on bitcoin you spend fiat and you stack sats uh it's safe and easy you can go to lolly.com slash ref slash tftc or you can use a special domain that our friend matt odell made that's spend fiat stack sats.com that is a ref link on lolly uh shout out to these sponsors honey Miner and Lolly. Really appreciate the help that they've provided this podcast in particular. Really excited for you guys to get into the interview with Jack. I had an incredible time. It was 30 minutes. It was a very quick 30 minutes, but I think it's a very dense 30 minutes. And I should disclose that Cash App has been a sponsor of this podcast in the past,

but there was very little Cash App talk in this podcast in particular. We stuck to Bitcoin. I think you freaks are going to enjoy it. Peace and love. What is up, freaks? Welcome back to Tales from the Crypt. It's your boy, Marty Bent, here in a very, very foreign studio on the left coast. Not in a bedroom, but in Square's office with a very important guest, a new member of the Casano team. I'd like to introduce you freaks to Jack Dorsey.

Jack, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for coming by, Square. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. This is a huge, big fan of the companies that you've built over the years. Twitter being my favorite app. We're here to talk about Bitcoin now. As tales from the crypt goes, we usually get the tale of how you found Bitcoin. So how did you get into Bitcoin and start working with it?

Yeah. So when I was, I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. And St. Louis, Missouri had this super active hacker culture. I don't know if many of you remember the magazine Frack, but a lot of the authors came from St. Louis and we had a ton of BBSs and we had WashU that had an internet backbone and once I got on the internet I found Usenet and once I found Usenet I found AltCypherPunks. Once I found AltCypherPunks I got into cryptography in a big way and this dream of cryptocurrency I just saw all the conversations around it so that was my first introduction at least to the concept and how fascinating it was and then you know didn't really do much with it with the exception of just you know diving into programming

cryptography and fascinated by that area until the white paper came out read it thought it was beautiful I thought it was you know I think it's one of the most seminal works in the past 20 years in in computer science and and was fascinated by it but didn't do anything with at that time. 2014, we decided to do something with it. We had this online store that allowed our sellers to sell their wares online. Very, you know, one button push to go from the hardware register to an online storefront. And we decided to enable buyers to use Bitcoin to purchase anything. And what we wanted to do is make that feel invisible to the seller. So the seller we would instantly convert it to us dollar and seller would just see us dollars so it gave

buyers with bitcoin an opportunity to spend and buyers didn't really have to think about it um we didn't see a lot of transactions um not not a lot of people using bitcoin back then were buying what our sellers were selling which were you know candles and coffee and whatnot so um we we let it we you know we kind of let it out there but ultimately decided uh to move away from that marketplace product. And, um, and then in, um, two years ago, I became fascinated by it again. And, uh, cash app was having a hack week. And I went over and asked, um, one of the engineers, uh, I was close with Mike Brock, if he wanted to do a hack week project with me. And, um, he asked me what and i said well i want to figure out if we can um store bitcoin and then go across the

street and using our apple pay card be able to spend that bitcoin to buy coffee um at blue bottle coffee it's always coffee people are always buying coffee i don't know why well you know we're we're from we're a very transactional company i guess and like we we focused first and foremost on on that so um we uh he said yes and he did most of the work um but uh we almost got it done in a week we didn't completely finish it but we almost got it there and then on that following monday we actually finished it and i actually bought coffee with it which was really cool and then um we just had some discussions we just decided we're we're gonna actually make this live and in the in the in the meantime, we, we also decided we probably shouldn't do the instant conversion thing right

now. We should probably focus on buying and selling. Um, and the reason why is because it was interesting to have that, you know, that the psychological aspect of, you know, um, using Bitcoin to purchase right now, there were, there was, you know, just so much potential for it to increase in value. So you're thinking about that instead of the, the coffee you're buying. So if you sell and that goes straight on your card and then you make the purchase at least you've cleared through that and and it feels much much cleaner from a psychological standpoint and um and it it took us some time um in the that year is when bitcoin had the massive run-up um and uh we learned a bunch along the way and i think we did all the right things in terms of the right customer

experience looking at the community making sure that we're going back to those use not days and contributing as much as we can we still have a ton more work to do there but um it was an exciting start and especially because we were the only public company doing it so it meant we had to talk to the sec and um uh kind of pave the way for others which which we were also happy about yeah no it's uh awesome to see what you guys rolled out in the last year in particular it's a favorite favorite app of the tales from the crypt freaks out there we started to sack stacking sats saturday oh awesome using everybody buying 25 worth of bitcoin i saw that i saw that on twitter all the screenshots i thought that was awesome i would have uh i would have uh

participated but i already exceeded my limit on the cash app so i couldn't i couldn't purchase anymore there's always tomorrow we're gonna be doing it tomorrow again tomorrow i probably can i think i think we have a limit that rotates every week or so there we go um so stepping back talking about like bitcoin in general uh one of the favorite books of bitcoiners is the sovereign individual was a book written in the mid 90s and a lot of bitcoiners like myself would believe a lot of the uh sort of predictions they made in that book in particular have come to fruition sort of disintermediation of media uh and money in particular so i think what you've built a twitter has uh i mean it's the most powerful communication tool in the world i would argue it's i mean i

the uh the access to information the access to people the fact that i was able to dm you fastest way to get your thoughts to the whole world exactly and so you have been on the front lines of sort of disrupting media and the sharing of ideas on twitter is there anything with bitcoin that you see like in parallel that sort of reminds you of early days of twitter or oh yeah totally i mean i i think um it's it's more the internet just this this trend of the internet and what the internet enables and you know this internet as a concept since 1979 it continues to break down these barriers of um and these boundaries that we put upon ourselves in terms of um communities or nations or cities or um just how we think about the segmentation of

the world, um, and enables us to think about one, um, one humanity. And, uh, I think we've seen that with certainly networking. We've seen it with, um, uh, media, we've seen that with communication and it feels like one of the most critical last, um, pillars of that is currency. And, uh, I guess I just approached this as like, what, what does the, what does the internet ultimately want? And And it will want to have a native currency. It will want to have a currency that is effectively global and exist on its territory instead of through the territories of the various nation states that we have today. So I think I can't think of anything more exciting than that. And also I think it speaks to Internet ideals and where the world is inherently going.

And I think anything, I don't want to wait around for that to happen to me or to us as a company. I want to help make it happen. So that's why getting more into Bitcoin and cryptocurrency was so interesting for us. I mean, apart from artificial intelligence, there's no other technology that impacts Square more than this. So we should definitely have a well-formed opinion on, on what it does, but also how to contribute and how to make it, um, how to make sure that we're contributing to the goodness of it, which is, it was born on the internet. It was derived on the internet. It was developed on the internet, iterated on the internet. It's for the internet.

So it requires a openness. It requires a contribution model. it requires in terms of development um and uh i think all these are things that are interesting from a corporate perspective because we don't want to put too much of our corporate weight on like just this amazing community that is so internet driven um so those are some of the questions we've been trying to figure out is like what's this corporate identity do for how where where is it positive and where is it negative and how how do we focus on more of the positives and And just admit like where there are negative ramifications.

I think us pushing in the SEC conversations was generally positive for other startups that will follow us and other entities looking for models that will help ultimately support this community to a broader audience. But still some open questions there. Yeah, no, it's actually I was rereading an old Bitcoin post. One of my favorite Bitcoin is worse is better by a man named Guern. where's that at uh i'll send miles a link if you can send it to you yeah miles uh an ace on your team there um he is and he's sitting right next to me at least on the other side of the table um that's a uh blog post for it in 2011 beautifully describes bitcoin actually mentioned twitter in it as well um and i actually thought of your interview with joe rogan

uh when you were describing like the early days of twitter like how the hashtag and the ad symbol came to be and you said you were just reacting to uh people using it and and sort of building what they were asking for but bitcoin that's sort of different uh especially since it's a distributed system and sort of designing and building on bitcoin compared to twitter uh seems to be a completely different animal and yeah i don't know if you have experience with distributed systems but uh just uh from developing bitcoin and and sort of how to like not being able to add features from a centralized team is a unique sort of barrier that we,

not barrier, hurdle that we have to overcome. Yeah, I mean, I grew up, at least in my programming career, in the Linux and open source and that sort of community and that fight punk before that, like this concept of working in public, failing in public, sharing what you know.

I eventually moved on to FreeBSD and OpenBSD, but that's another story. I think early, early, early Twitter where we had, I think it's interesting because it is amazing. Twitter is so much a movement with a company to kind of give it auction. And the auction being that we pay people to help continue to grow it, our employees. But in early Twitter, like we just saw all these patterns of how people wanted to use Twitter. and we just took this approach of like we want to really observe and learn what Twitter wants to be.

And we started with this concept of broadcasting status and immediately actually one of our lead designer for the Cash App is the first person that ever used the at symbol on Twitter. And he was at Buzz, which is his brother, and he was trying to communicate and address him directly. And we looked at that. we observed that the use case here is people are trying to communicate with each other have a conversation and once we i took you know four hours in a cafe here called stacks and haze valley and

and coded that up and deployed it to production and once we did that and added the replies tab twitter became less about just sharing status and more about conversation which was further emboldened by you know chris messina using the first hashtag and uh to organize tweets around topics and um and that led us to buying a search engine that that did that very well um so we also had this really thriving developer community that um we had an extremely open api which also caused us some problems because we didn't have enough restrictions and it forced us it crashed the the service numerous numerous times that and like the twitter whale the infamous twitter whale our developer api was the root cause of that and anytime steve jobs

would get up and talk about a new thing that Apple was launching, we would crash. Those are the two only things that were somewhat predictable is unrestricted use of the API and Steve Jobs. But I think that we saw a lot of really interesting developer initiative and co-creation.

And I'm sad that we pulled back on some of that. We'd love to get back to a position where we encourage much more of that. And, you know, we're talking a lot about what that means and what that looks like. But I think Twitter is interesting because it hits something so fundamental that it felt more like a protocol than a product and a company. And I guess there's some parallels with some things about Bitcoin and the community. But there's just so much more optionality and freedom and direction and experimentation that you can do with a protocol that's not controlled by a corporation. Yeah.

No, for me, I think I got on Twitter in 2011, but really didn't start using it until like 2013, 2014 when I found Bitcoin. And that's the one thing I learned using it in particular. You have to learn how to filter and find the sources and adversarial sources in a certain topic and put them together. and so that's a lot of work that's where we can improve yeah so that's where we're just looking at my tweet deck there i've been building my bitcoin list for five years now it's like almost 900 people and it's just like a stream i feel like i'm in the matrix sometimes just everybody crypto twitter going at each other yeah we had a um we had a product manager who a long time ago had an idea of enabling you to kind of view twitter through the lens of anyone else's following

graph it'd be interesting to see yours for me it'd be interesting to see yours that's actually i think my uh bitcoin list has like 430 followers or something like that so it's like i never thought people would follow the list but yeah list is also something that i think is extremely powerful powerful primitive but we just haven't connected it into the mainline uh service enough yeah um while we're on the topic of twitter a good friend of the podcast arjun balaji tweeted out today that you handed off the lightning torch uh the year is 2024 via a musk-like maneuver cash app and twitter have morphed creating a bitcoin native millennial bank on top of the most important communication platform on the planet to offer uncensorable speech and payments jack wins the

nobel prize is this gonna happen um um i i mean i i think there's a lot of um i think there's a lot of interestingness for obviously for square but also for twitter around the trends that um blockchain point to and i talked a little bit about this on derogan and sam harris like you know we are we we finally have line of sight to technologies that allow all content to exist forever strong annotation throughout it um and that's really compelling i think it's compelling from a trust standpoint i think it's compelling from a data privacy and protection standpoint i think it's compelling from a content standpoint um so there's a lot to think about there um and certainly thinking thinking a lot about that what

what does that mean for where twitter's value truly is um and uh i think you know a lot of a lot of services like ours there's a there's a conflation with you know just the the mechanics of the of the app and then also the content hosting and i wonder if those things will start to break apart as you have more of these technologies used and in ways that they i feel like that they're pointing towards so right now i'm just asking a bunch of those questions and of myself and also of our team yeah it's fascinating i mean especially around like the concept of pseudonymity on twitter uh especially in the bitcoin community there's obviously a lot of pseudonymous people want to remain anonymous and they provide a lot of good information like

stopping the crypt shall and fry we would not have segwit without shall and fry who basically figured out how to he wrote bit 148 i believe um and that's just interesting and these these characters in particular provide a lot of value to to our community but i do know there's a ton of bad actors and a lot of hateful speech coming from a lot of anon accounts and it's i can't imagine sort of the the trouble you have to wade through sort of de-alienating between what's earnest and what's not yeah i i i often get asked the question you know you you have they i'm happy that you said it as pseudonymous because that that's what we want to optimize for it's not anonymity we're not we're not optimizing for people creating accounts saying something and

deleting when optimized for pseudonymity which is built identity and ideally some built reputation around and i think more importantly like credibility credibility around a particular topic so focusing on like how we can understand credibility and authority within a topic in real time is a tough problem but the right problem to try to solve but you know people often ask me shouldn't you just move to a real real names policy like um like facebook and um i mean if you look at um facebook and you look at twitter i would ask the question are they having the same problems we're having i think you're doing it better well but but the answer is yes so there's no it's not one single solution you can't just run it uh to real names uh renee dinestra on

And the Sam Harris podcast recently said that there's a lens to see real names as somewhat diminishing because it kind of diminishes a healthy skepticism. And with pseudonyms, this might be a stretch argument, but with pseudonyms, at least you bear this healthy skepticism, which I do believe is important. You know, you wonder a little bit more, but there's a lot more we could do around identifying the humans on the platform and trying to identify credibility within topics and recognize more of the patterns of behaviors that some of these accounts take on. And, um, we, you know, we have models that show if like we have some account who's going to your replies and just harassing you like crazy, you know, it, we can predict that they're doing it to others as well. Um, and, and that's, that's interesting, but I don't think moving, switching purely to real name solves any issue at all.

and it takes away a real opportunity some of which you mentioned but also one of the reasons we think it's important is you know we have journalists in the world who go behind a pseudonym and report on their country we have activists in the world who fear for their life and their career if they had to use their the real identity or email address or phone number so these are the things we want to want to balance whistleblowers um within companies or industry or government um that we've seen uh you know utilize the pseudonymity to to great effect so we just need to think about that you know the balance of all those things as as we think about solutions yeah um yeah i can't imagine the uh the gravity of that situation for you in particular um it's uh

I don't know if I would want that burden. I'm learning a lot. You know, I love learning, and this is a super complex and interesting new space. Well, it's changing the world. So, like, I'm obviously into Bitcoin. That's why we're here right now. And so, like, I'm fascinated about, like,

the concept that we're born in this inflection point, and things are changing at rapid pace. And like you said, so, like, Twitter, for me, the first time I realized Twitter's power was, I think it was 2012 when we were thinking about bombing Syria after the rumors of chemical gas attacks. And I think Twitter had a role in us not acting right away because people got on Twitter and sort of basically voiced their opinion. And obviously there's world leaders on Twitter. There's people seeing it.

You can see the hashtags. You can see the sentiment. and so twitter sort of flashed this example to the world like hey these technologies are sort of curbing the state a little bit and bitcoin i think takes that to many orders of magnitude higher especially with money because states control money and that's so that's what bitcoin is trying to get uh it's it's a sly way as hike would say a famous uh austrian economist uh we will not have a good money until we find a sly roundabout way to take it from the hands of the government it seems like bitcoin might be that thing um and but it's heavy right because it does

directly uh sort of conflict with the state and their control over money and do you think about that a lot or um i i guess i just think about it in a dimension of um the the internet creates a new reality and the internet will want its own currency right so it's independent of the state for me um and i i i i just think there's so much interestingness there and um i i would want our nation states to figure out how to make that work for their constituencies um and and provide bridges to it because i think it's a net positive there's There's going to be a ton of issues, obviously, but I see more net positives in us realizing this faster than I do negatives, and certainly it enables us to potentially organize faster around bigger existential things that no one nation state can solve alone. And I'm a huge fan of Yuval, who wrote Sapiens and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century.

And, you know, one of the problems he puts out in 21 Lessons is that, like, we're not talking enough as a globe about the existential problems. We're not asking our politicians enough about solving those. And no matter how much China does around climate change or the displacement of work through artificial intelligence, it can't solve the global problem alone. It has to be everyone. And ultimately, you know, people might realize that these things are constraining and right around that. So you want every means available to you, communication, you want media, you want currency, obviously. um so i i think all these are fundamentals but to me it all goes back to the internet what what does the internet want to be and it wants a it wants a currency it's always wanted a currency

it just hasn't had the technology until 10 years ago um like you know to to really look at something that is that is uniform and and and that is um uh has has the right principles behind it and uh has a lot of people who are passionate enough to spend all like a huge make all these sacrifices to contribute to it for a greater good beyond themselves no i completely agree and sorry let's get a little cosmic here like so that's another theme on this podcast is getting cosmic and a lot of people uh a lot of people say that not that this is the first iteration of the internet but the first sort of wave of commercial apps on the Internet may have sort of made some design mistakes from the get-go

that we're still trying to fix. Bitcoin can help with that. Other things can help with that too, but in the timeline of the Internet becoming ubiquitous and everybody having access to it, where do you think we are on that? So in The Sovereign Individual, they talk about 500-year inflection points

based around technological innovation, and they argue that the Internet is that, and 100 years after that technology is created is a very tumultuous time or a very chaotic time. So from a grand vision of what you see the Internet becoming, where are we on that timeline? I don't know, but I guess what I think about is imagine being born this year,

growing up only knowing that the potential for a global currency exists. that is exciting so i mean just what that person does the person born in this year or you know even the past few years only growing up only knowing that this potential exists what that person does with that realization is amazing i mean you kind of see this with the adoption of any critical technology like you know you see children today going up to any screen and having an expectation that they can slide it and touch it and zoom and use their fingers and it just speaks to the impact that the iPhone and the iPad had in changing the expectation and the same was

true for the internet and the same is true for the mobile phone and the same is will be true for for bitcoin and blockchain digital currency so i it feels like that just accelerates things even faster and i think the uh accessibility of programming gets to a younger and younger age like the tools today i started programming when i was 14 with the tools today i would have been programming when i was like six and like was it would be able to build something that i would feel proud of and that had some substance to it whereas i just couldn't figure out how to do that like when i was when i was actually six so i'm 42 um and so i i think the way i'd comment on it is like i think there's a massive acceleration that is going to happen within the next 10 years

because the generation growing up only knowing that these technologies exist pairing ai with blockchain and being able to have this amazingly accessible environment to program in so that that's what excites me like the the acceleration points rather than the the specific points in the timeline I just think we get more and more accelerants yeah no it's crazy and so thinking about the ways in which these kids learn it seems like the education system as well like sort of needs to change and catch up with the time too because I feel like totally programming in schools is probably not as well taught as it could be. Totally.

Yeah, I mean, for me, I dropped out of school. I dropped out of college because I was just learning much faster externally by working on stuff than I was internally. And everyone has their own different way of learning, but I do think given all the resources available to folks right now, the kids growing up today will have probably more preference towards a more digital education and an education through experimentation,

which to me would have been really exciting. I mean, that's the best way I learned. It's just education through experimentation and the playgrounds being crafted that allow you to play with programming languages and concepts like algorithms and models and neural networks and even blockchain at a very, very young age is really compelling to me

and something I'd, you know, if I have kids, it would definitely, you know, make available and hope that they choose. Yeah. We're approaching our 30 minutes here. All right, we got like a minute left. I guess we should wrap it up with, what are you going to do with your cost of edge?

What's the first thing you're going to do with it? I'm going to plug it in tonight and figure out what the hell's going on. And I'm excited because I love experiencing entirely new technologies that people have worked so hard to produce. And especially, I love hardware, too. I got into technology because of my dad, and he would tinker all the time. And he worked on mass spectrometers and had all these Heath kits, and I loved tinkering with them. So I love software, but I love the tangibility of this box and being able to plug it in and just kind of tinker with it.

And so I'm going to learn as much as I can tonight and get some pizza. I would love to see some Jack graffiti on satoshis.place. A great place to test out some Lightning Network transactions. I'll see if I can get that. Take a screenshot, try it on Twitter. It'll blow up. Will do. Jack, it's been a pleasure.

I can't wait to participate in a Stacking Sat Saturday with you tomorrow. I'll make sure the limit's clear. But if it is, I'll be there with you. If not, next Saturday. All right. Well, again, appreciate the time. Huge fan. Awesome.

You've changed my life for the better, I would argue. Thank you so much. So thank you. Appreciate your work. Peace and love, freaks. Okay. Well, that was a surreal experience. I know I had an incredible time.

I hope you freaks enjoyed the conversation as much as I did. Before we end here, got to give a quick shout out to our sponsors again. First off, we got Lolly. Lolly lets you earn up to 30% back in Bitcoin when you shop online. They have over 750 merchants available for you freaks. Anyone from Jet, Overstock, SeatGeek, Priceline, Hotwire, Gap, Macy's, Hilton, Marriott, many more uh it's safe and easy way to to earn bitcoin when you're spending online lolly.com slash ref slash tftc or you can make it easier go to spendfiatstacksats.com

also we got honeyminer honeyminer is the easiest way to earn bitcoin a simple crypto mining application that uses your computer cpus and gpus to mine cryptocurrencies and pays you in bitcoin Download the app today at honeyminer.com. That's honeyminer.com. If you want to make it easier, you can go to stackingsats.com as well. Whether you have a spare laptop at home or a professional mining operation, HoneyMiner is the easiest and most profitable crypto mining software available on the market. It's going to win hundreds of thousands of users from 167 countries already mining on the network today.

Again, go to honeyminer.com or stackingsats.com. You'll get a free 1,000 Satoshi Bitcoin bonus. Thank you, freaks, for joining us today. hope you enjoyed it as much as I did peace and love