Earlier today, Jack Dorsey, who is the co-founder and former CEO of Twitter, as well as the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Block (formerly known as Square), criticized fellow billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, who is the co-founder and CEO of crypto exchange FTX.

In an interview published in Financial Times (FT) on Monday (May 16), the 30-year-old FTX CEO, whose nickname is “SBF, said:

“The bitcoin network is not a payments network and it is not a scaling network... Things that you’re doing millions of transactions a second with have to be extremely efficient and lightweight and lower energy cost. Proof of stake networks are.“

Although SBF expressed concern over the energy consumption of Bitcoin mining (saying “it has to be the case that we don’t scale this up to the point where we’re spending 100 times as much eventually as we are today on energy costs for mining”), he does believe that Bitcoin is important as a store of value (similar to gold).

Naturally, SBF’s view of Bitcoin upset a large subset of the crypto community (especially Bitcoin maximalists).

Here is one example:

Another prominent member of the crypto community not happy with the FT interview was Adam Back, Co-Founder and CEO of Blockstream:

Back went on to say that SBF should get some media training so that he does not create more Bitcoin FUD by accident:

“they can’t say that if you half-ignore their question and say something you want to say. this is not that hard, with a bit of practice 🙂 get some media training. also @SBF_FTX stop FUDding #bitcoin transactions, PoW etc. if bitcoin fails all the alts fail. you kinda owe BTC.“

As for Block CEO Jack Dorsey, he could not understand why the FTX CEO had not mentioned during the FT interview that although the Bitcoin network might not be suitable for handling thousands/millions of transactions per second, Bitcoin’s layer 2 scaling solution Lightning Network could scale nicely in the future to handle this level of demand.

SBF replied:

Dorsey also tweeted that people need to be a bit more patient with Bitcoin’s Lightning Network and that Proof of Work (PoW) consensus is essential for Bitcoin:

Furthermore, when American cryptographer Matthew Green asked Dorsey if Block was ready to provide sufficient liquidity for Bitcoin’s Lightning Network to allow it to “handle real payments at scale”, Dorsey replied that his company is considering doing this.

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Disclaimer

The views and opinions expressed by the author, or any people mentioned in this article, are for informational purposes only, and they do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice. Investing in or trading cryptoassets comes with a risk of financial loss.