Associated Press
- Bitcoin and blockchain will shape Twitter’s future through a decentralized internet standard, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said at the Oslo Freedom Forum 2020 last week.
- BlueSky, a designated team tasked with developing the standard, will hire about five people to build a protocol enabling Twitter’s transition to a decentralized platform.
- Dorsey’s renewed motivation towards a “trusted system in a distrusted environment” comes after July’s massive security breach in which hackers took over dozens of high-profile Twitter accounts.
- “I fundamentally believe that security is something that can never be perfected,” he said. “It’s a constant race. It’s a constant push to be ten steps ahead of hackers.”
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The future of social media platform Twitter will be shaped by Bitcoin and its underlying technology, according to chief executive Jack Dorsey, who was once again endorsing a decentralized social media standard at a virtual conference on September 25.
“A lot of our value in the past was around content hosting. So we would host the tweets, the images, and videos,” Dorsey said at the virtual Oslo Freedom Forum 2020.
“Blockchain and bitcoin point to a future, and point to a world, where content exists forever, where it’s permanent, where it doesn’t go away, where it exists forever on every single node that’s connected to it,” the billionaire told Human Rights Foundation president, Thor Halvorssen.
Dorsey’s revolutionary conceptualization of open, decentralized social media is meant to transform the company’s relevance as a “content hosting” platform.
Dorsey’s designated team called BlueSky expects to hire “five engineers and some folks” to build Twitter as an open protocol, similar to that which email operates on, and aims to offer an alternative to traditional, centralized social media platforms.
“Right now we’re in the phase of finding a leader for it, but this is a completely separate non-profit from the company,” he said. “This group will be tasked with building a protocol that we can use and everyone else can use.”
“You see this most fundamentally in Bitcoin and in blockchain. The keys will be more and more in the hands of the individual,” he said.
Bitcoin is the largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, at almost $200 billion, compared with runner-up Ethereum, with a market value of $40 billion, according to CoinMarketCap.
Dorsey’s push towards a decentralized platform comes after July’s massive security breach in which hackers took over dozens of high-profile accounts including those of former US president Barack Obama, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, Tesla founder Elon Musk, reality TV celebrity Kim Kardashian, and iPhone maker Apple, using them to post fraudulent Bitcoin links.
“I fundamentally believe that security is something that can never be perfected,” he said. “It’s a constant race. It’s a constant push to be ten steps ahead of hackers.”
“The whole spirit of Bitcoin, for instance, is to provide a trusted system in a distrusted environment, which is the internet.”
Earlier this month, Dorsey told Reuters that Bitcoin is the most viable internet-native currency as it is “consensus driven” and “built by everyone.”