Dorsey Reaffirms Square’s Commitment To Bitcoin In Tweet

Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey has come out in favor of bitcoin, saying Square would always work to boost the cryptocurrency, Bloomberg says.

Dorsey said bitcoin “changes everything for the better.”

He made the tweet in what seemed to be a response to a tweet from Square Chief Financial Officer Amrita Ahuja, who said Square’s strategy had not changed.

Earlier, Financial News had quoted Ahuja as saying there would be a halting of bitcoin purchases by Square.

The company previously lost $20 million on bitcoin last quarter.

Dorsey, in a follow-up tweet, said he agreed with the idea that crypto needed to be free from any attempt to change things from one single person or institution.

To that end, bitcoin’s price fell sharply after comments from Elon Musk in which he said his company Tesla would no longer be accepting crypto payments for the company, due to environmental concerns – a reversal from a previous stance he took.

In that event, the entire crypto market lost over $365 billion.

Musk tweeted that the company was “concerned about rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for bitcoin mining and transactions, especially coal, which has the worst emissions of any fuel,” according to PYMNTS.

He added that crypto was a “good idea on many levels” but that there would have to be some reckoning with how it interacted with the economy.

The crypto market before Musk’s announcement had a value of $2.43 trillion. Three hours after his announcement, the value had dropped to $2.06 trillion, with bitcoin falling 12 percent, marking the first time that coin was valued below $50,000 since an early April rally.

That said, even with the drop, bitcoin was still up 400 percent in the last year.

Square has posted earnings which focused primarily on digital payments and bitcoin.

The trends will likely see a continuation of card-not-present transactions, which was up 24 percent year-over-year in GPV in the third quarter.