Ethereum alone not enough to disrupt Big Tech: Jack Dorsey

Self-professed Bitcoin (BTC) maximalist Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, is not giving Ethereum (ETH) fans an inch. In his latest offhand remark about the market’s second-largest cryptocurrency, Dorsey downplayed the platform’s potential to shake up the status quo in Big Tech single-handedly:

Disrupting “Big Tech” is exactly what’s needed and what I want.

No one technology alone will do that though.

— jack⚡️ (@jack) August 12, 2021

Dorsey’s comment followed an online discussion of the usefulness of a full-blown integration of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) into Twitter, which @seyitaylor argued would be more to the benefit of Ethereum than to the social media site. 

Dorsey agreed that such a move would be more consequential for the Ethereum ecosystem than for his own platform but added: “Every account on Twitter being able to link to a Lightning wallet however…”

Despite Twitter’s previous dabbles in the world of NFTs – and Dorsey’s own use of the technology to raise money for charity – Dorsey has remained a staunch Bitcoin advocate, much to the frustration of both Ethereum diehards and less sectarian crypto fans. 

When one Twitterer responded to Dorsey’s comments, pushing him to explain, “Why the ETH hate then if there’s room for more than one piece to the puzzle?” Dorsey’s rejoinder was that “focus on one thing isn’t hate of the others. I’ve made my concerns known about others in comparison to Bitcoin. Key ones are founding principles, security, and centralization.”

Related: No, Jack Dorsey isn't trolling ETH by making its logo the Ethiopian flag

On another Twitter thread, @garrytan probed the “mystery” of Dorsey’s single-minded preoccupation with Bitcoin, which @timothy_skim proposed was the veteran crypto’s promise to serve as “sound money,” which he claimed was “critical,” “especially for the globally underprivileged.” Dorsey joined the discussion to agree, asserting that he’s in Bitcoin “to help fix the money,” adding he was "not trolling."

In yet another of the multiple threads circling the same theme, Dorsey rebuffed claims he was intentionally throwing shade on Ethereum and clarified that for him, “decentralization isn’t an end goal [...] it’s just one method of fixing the money." Elsewhere on Twitter, Dorsey said that while he agrees with the spirit NFTs, his advocacy of Lightning in this context had been nothing to do with them but rather with “enabl[ing] a currency for the internet.”

This has been a long-time motto of Dorsey’s, who has repeatedly argued that Bitcoin will be the sole currency of the internet since at least 2018. Unlike other Bitcoin fans, who concede there could one day be a “flippening” of the two top coins’ fortunes, he has remained, as far as is publicly known, reluctant to invest in the altcoin to this day.