Mike Peterson
At a Bitcoin-centric conference in Miami, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey says that his payment company Square is considering making a standalone hardware wallet for Bitcoin.
Dorsey is one of the headline speakers at the Bitcoin 2021 conference in Miami, Florida on June 4 and June 5. During the conference, the Square founder teased a branded bitcoin wallet.
Square is considering making a hardware wallet for #bitcoin. If we do it, we would build it entirely in the open, from software to hardware design, and in collaboration with the community. We want to kick off this thinking the right way: by sharing some of our guiding principles.
— jack (@jack) June 4, 2021
In subsequent tweets, Dorsey detailed some of those "guiding principles," including the fact that "Bitcoin is for everyone" and that users should own their own keys. He also pointed out that most people are on mobile and that a Bitcoin wallet would need to blend availability and security.
Other principles that the company is considering includes safety, the ability to recover Bitcoin, and trust. He said that the Layer 2 protocol, which enables fast transactions and scalability, and integration with the Cash app are also top priorities.
Shares of Square jumped 2.5% on the news in intraday trading on Friday.
To be clear, the Dorsey tweet is not an announcement of a coming product. According to the Twitter and Square CEO, the company is still only considering the possibility.
However, Dorsey said he and his team "will listen and continue the conversation." He added that the company would set up a dedicated Twitter and Github account for the project "if we decide to build."
Square isn't the only fintech company mulling an expanded cryptocurrency footprint. Back in March, PayPal announced that it would allow users to use their crypto holdings to pay for purchases. The Coinbase debit card, which also allows users to pay for products and services using crypto, introduced Apple Pay and Google Pay support in June.
Tesla earlier in 2021 purchased $1.5 billion in Bitcoin, but later said it would stop accepting the cryptocurrency due to environmental concerns.
Some analysts believe that cryptocurrency should be a future financial gambit for Apple, too. There are some early signs that Apple is considering some type of alternate payment system that includes cryptocurrency support.
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William Gallagher
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4 Comments
Maybe Elon will buy one?
Most crypto "currencies" are too volatile to be good currencies. The price of bitcoin has changed by more than 35% in a single day! Coinbase's debit card warns that all transactions may qualify as capital gains or losses. You'd do better to have a debit card that withdraws money from your margin account for stock trades.
Would bitcoin just please get up and die a quick miserable death?
It’s barely used today, and yet “mining” already gobbles up more energy than a small nation state. Imagine people would use it to buy bubble gum and toothpaste, and the energy consumption would skyrocket. It’s just insane from a resource and energy point of view, at least while the world hasn’t even started to phase out “green energy” and started its shift to green nuclear power (much less completed that shift).
Bitcoin is a flawed concept bound to fail: the only question is WHEN?
There are other crypto currencies, like e.g. ETH, that don’t have this fundamental flaw (but still are way too volatile due to the speculative bubble) which may or may not be a good long term investment, depending on when you bought in and how long you intend to hold on. But that’s a different matter.
At the latest since Tesla dumped Bitcoin, nobody can claim “they didn’t know”.
I am going to repeat this warning about “Clepto-Currencies” aka cryptocurrency:
No government on the planet regardless of it form will allow for long a piece of any monetary tender to exist that it or any government can not manipulate, seize, trace or control both inside or outside of its border!