In a recent interview, Jack Dorsey – the man behind billion-dollar companies such as Square and Twitter – said that Mark Zuckerberg – the CEO of Facebook, now Meta – was wrong to try and start his own cryptocurrency venture, and he feels things would have been more successful if he had focused on bitcoin.
Jack Dorsey Is Critical of Diem
BTC is the world’s largest and most popular cryptocurrency. Dorsey has long been a fan, working to enhance trading through Square and recently announcing that he’s looking to open the world of bitcoin mining to everyone by making it a lot easier to understand. He claimed in a recent discussion that Diem – the cryptocurrency project that Facebook was working on – would have been a solid program if it had simply stuck to bitcoin.
Instead, executives sought to establish something all their own, and thus it wound up getting run into the ground. One of the big problems, in Dorsey’s mind, was that Diem allegedly sought to bring people to its own suite of products too much. It felt like an exclusive program that not everyone could be part of, and as a result, people wound up turning their backs on it altogether.
Dorsey said:
They tried to create a currency that was owned by Facebook, probably for the right reasons, probably for noble reasons, but there were also some reasons that would indicate trying to get more and more people onto the Facebook ecosystem. They did that instead of using an open protocol and standard like bitcoin. Hopefully they learned a lot, but I think there was a lot of wasted effort and time. Those two years or three years, or however long it’s been, could have been spent making bitcoin more accessible for more people around the world, which would also benefit their messenger product and Instagram and WhatsApp.
Diem – which was initially known as Libra – was introduced to consumers in the summer of 2019. While Facebook may have had solid intentions when it came to establishing a new digital currency that individuals could use to pay for goods and services through the social media network, things were not seen that way by users who had just been subjected to the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
People Probably Didn’t Trust It
That event occurred just the year prior and saw Mark Zuckerberg sitting before a congressional panel answering questions about why the company had been selling people’s private information for so long without their knowledge or consent.
It appears many people – after this took place – were not comfortable sharing their financial information with Facebook, nor were they okay with allowing the company to have any more control than it already did. Thus, Diem – it can be suggested – is simply a project that was released by the wrong firm at the wrong time. All assets tied to the project have since been privately sold.
Source: https://www.livebitcoinnews.com/jack-dorsey-mark-zuckerberg-should-have-just-focused-on-btc/