It’s no secret that Jack Dorsey loves Bitcoin. Square, his fintech company, already has bitcoin in its balance sheets, and will likely be looking to accumulate more bitcoin. But, in a recent statement, he has stated that he believes Bitcoin to be the single most important thing to have happened in the last decade.
Square and Jack have also released a few announcements over the last couple of days related to Bitcoin.
Renewable energy Bitcoin mining
As part of Square’s Bitcoin Clean Energy Initiative, they have teamed up with Blockstream to launch a renewable mining project. As part of the launch, Square will invest $5M in the project, and Blockstream will provide the facility and infrastructure, as well as management expertise.
There has been a lot of posturing lately with regard to mining efficiently via renewables for Bitcoin, as mining takes up a lot of energy. I think this is overall a step in the right direction in showing everyone that bitcoin can be a net positive, not just from a financial inclusion perspective, but also from an energy consumption point of view.
This is not a new discussion. Miners are naturally pre-dispositioned to try and minimise their costs as far as possible, and this means seeking out the lowest cost of electricity, or using renewables as far as they can.
This whole fiasco started with Elon Musk tweeting about Tesla’s about-turn with regard to accepting Bitcoin as payment, citing energy consumption concerns. This prompted Galaxy Digital to work on a piece of research to debunk this.
The end result is a paper on Bitcoin Energy Consumption which you can read if you’re interested.
Tl;dr
The paper estimated the annual energy consumption across Bitcoin, Gold and Banks, and concluded that the traditional banking system took up the most energy, although there was a caveat that this was not a conclusive number, but a study done in good faith.
Square may get into the Bitcoin hardware wallet business
In yet another tweet thread, Jack Dorsey laid out a series of ideas and philosophies when it came down to designing a bitcoin hardware wallet.
The 14 tweet long thread covered ideas from self custody, mobile accessibility vs security, recovery mechanisms and layer 2 support. Cash App integration will definitely be under consideration as well, seeing that this will be a Square product.
It’s really interesting to see Jack’s thoughts and considerations in building a hardware wallet out in the open, true to the spirit of using open source hardware and software to build, but also open sourcing ideas around how to make it as best as they can.
There are already a bunch of crypto hardware wallets out there, from ledger to trezor to wallet backup products like cryptotag. It will be interesting to see what Square and Jack can add to the mix.
Jack Dorsey really loves Bitcoin
Finally, Jack really loves bitcoin. In fact, he loves bitcoin so much, that one day, if bitcoin ever needed saving (not that it ever will, nor has been over the past decade), he would totally ditch Twitter and Square for Bitcoin.
Below was what he said at the Bitcoin 2021 conference in Miami over the weekend:
Not the best thing to hear if you’re an employee of any of his companies… but there you go. @Jack will save the day and be the flag bearer of Bitcoin.
If needed.
Which of course, isn’t needed.
Right?
At press time as of the publishing of this article, Bitcoin was trading at US$36,642.
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