Hi there. This is 21 and 21, a rapidfire Q&A show filmed at Presidio Bitcoin, the Bay Area's first Bitcoin co-working and event space. I'm Haley Burko and I ask visitors who have stopped by Presidio Bitcoin 21 questions in 21 minutes. It's okay if we don't get through them all. We'll do our best. Today, our guest is whoever this guy is. Jack, I've got my clock right here and it's ready to go. Jack, once I hit the button, it's go time. Are you ready?
I'm ready. I don't know what I'm ready for, but I'm ready.
What brings you to Presidio Bitcoin?
What are you working on right now?
Right now, we're doing a ton, but it's mainly Block-related.
Are any of the things that you're working on important to Bitcoin's future, and why?
I believe so. We have a team working on mining, an open-source mining rig and chipset. We have a team working on Bitkey, which is a self-custodial wallet. And then we have our Bitcoin exchange business within Cash App, and we're just looking at ways to better integrate Bitcoin with everything that we do because it helps our business. If we have an open protocol for any transmission that works on the internet anywhere, we can build our business everywhere, whereas today that's just not the case because we need a partnership with a bank. So all these things are very, very good for us and I think good for Bitcoin as well.
How did you become a Bitcoiner?
I followed the cypherpunks pretty early. I was very interested in the open internet and Usenet and cryptographers and applied mathematics. Early on, a big follower of Adam Back and what he did with the four lines of Perl, exporting PHP. There's just a very cool, wild world and the dream for that group was always money and money transmission. When we started Square at the end of 2008, 2009, the white paper had just come out and I just thought it was brilliant. It was poetic and we were just about to get in the mix with the credit card networks and the banks and whatnot. This was another path and someone was thinking about that and there was a movement around it that connected the dots with the old cypherpunks for me. It just felt amazing but early.
What are you currently most excited by in the Bitcoin space right now?
Mining. Our team's mining rig. I just think it's important. I think it's another point of centralization that we can help diminish and further decentralize. We'll have our system, but I'm excited to see what other people build with it and how they customize it.
What do you consider the most Bitcoin project in Bitcoin today?
The most Bitcoin project within Bitcoin? Bitcoin Core. The work that group does, the deliberateness, the adversarial thinking they have to do on a regular basis. I think it's the most important and the most complicated. I just have a huge amount of respect for that collection of individuals.
So let's fast forward to the future and Bitcoin has failed. How did it fail?
I think it fails through irrelevance. It just fails to be relevant to people on a daily basis. If it just ends up being store of value and nothing more, I don't think it gains relevance at all. It has to be payments for it to be relevant on the everyday, otherwise it's just something you kind of buy and forget and only use in emergency situations or when you want to get liquid again. If it doesn't transition to payments and find that everyday use case, it just gets increasingly irrelevant, and that's failure to me.
What do you think that we can do to mitigate that risk that led to failure?
I think building simple, accessible experiences that solve the payment use case, making it scale, making it fast, giving the speed of the Visa and Mastercard networks real competition. I think all that changes, and there's tons of projects to do that. It continues to increase in privacy and security and ultimately safety, gives you a third option. I think we always want a third option to the US dollar, to the Chinese bond. Having a third option for currency is important and it keeps the other currencies in check and governments in check as well.
So, Bitcoin is quite volatile. How do we get people to use Bitcoin as a currency despite the volatility?
Well, it's volatile. It's only 16 years old, 17 years old. On that time frame, anything just getting started is going to look volatile until people really understand it better and understand the use cases and have a different relationship with it. We all remember when we were 16 years old, it was a little bit of a wild time, and I think that's expected. It's just going to take time. Continuing to make it more accessible, continuing to make it easier, continuing to make it more private, lean into the things that brought us all here in the first place and those principles, I think more and more people will turn their attention towards it.
What's your most controversial Bitcoin opinion?
I don't know if it's controversial, but I think we can do better than Lightning. It's not that Lightning is bad, it's just challenging. Bitcoin is an incredible layer one and I don't think we just want to settle with having one layer two. We need to experiment a whole lot more and have different alternatives and play around because we never know what's going to stick. There might be different use cases that each of these alternative layer twos solves for in a better way, and having more choice rather than just being religious about one, I think will be best for Bitcoin and best to kind of meet people where they are in terms of how to actually use it for a daily use case.
This might be related to the answer you just gave me, but what's your dream project that you would like to see Bitcoiners build?
