On Thursday (October 24), during a media event (Twitter News Summit) in New York City, Jack Dorsey, Co-Founder and CEO of Twitter, and the Founder and CEO of Square, reportedly expressed his disapproval with the Facebook-led Libra project.
One of the journalists present at this event was Kerry Flynn, a media reporter at CNN.
During the “Fireside Chat” session at this event, Ben Smith, BuzzFeed’s Editor-in-Chief got to ask Dorsey some questions.
Next up is @BuzzFeedBen interviewing @jack. Jack starts off with, “I’m very monotone. I speak very slowly and sometimes in an abstract way.” #TwitterNewsSummit pic.twitter.com/kxatBlvnNW
— Kerry Flynn 🐶 (@kerrymflynn) October 24, 2019
According to Flynn, when Smith asked Dorsey if Twitter would ever consider joining the Libra Association, Dorsey gave a very definitive “no” as his reply, and added that it was wrong for Facebook to refer to Libra as a cryptocurrency:
Would Twitter join Libra? “No. Hell no. Nothing within Libra had to be a cryptocurrency to do what they want to do. They use that label liberally. It’s completely incorrect. I don’t know if it’s a gimmick but cryptocurrency wasn’t necessary to make that thing work.” – @jack
— Kerry Flynn 🐶 (@kerrymflynn) October 24, 2019
Ashley Carman, a reporter at The Verge, says that Dorsey went on to explain why he didn’t like the Libra project:
It’s not an internet open standard that was born on the internet. It was born out of a company’s intention, and it’s not consistent with what I personally believe and what I want our company to stand for.
The Twitter CEO was, however, more enthusiastic about the use of decentralized digital currencies, such as Bitcoin, for making payments:
I think the internet is somewhat of an emerging nation-state in almost every way. It almost has a currency now in the form of cryptocurrency and bitcoin.
When Mashable reached out to Riccardo Spagni, the lead maintainer for the Monero (XMR) project, he agreed with Dorsey by saying that it was “intellectually dishonest” to call Libra a cryptocurrency:
Not to put too fine a point on it, but from a technical perspective there is little difference between Libra's consensus mechanism deciding if your transaction is worthy of inclusion, and Visa alone deciding if your transaction should be processed. It’s central banking by another name, a permissioned central banking committee instead of a government-appointed one.
