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> you're not going to be able to give the focus a solo CEO is. I agree. As much as he tried to justify the dual CEO roles, it never made any sense. It was als

> you're not going to be able to give the focus a solo CEO is. I agree. As much as he tried to justify the dual CEO roles, it never made any sense. It was also maddening to watch him shift to a 3rd focus of promoting cryptocurrency and his own cryptocurrency investments. Hanging on to the CEO role of both Twitter and Square put him in a great position to push both companies toward more cryptocurrency integration, but it never felt like it was being done for the benefit of the users of each platform.

b112 5y ago
but it never felt like it was being done for the benefit of the users of each platform. The point of platforms is not to benefit the users, otherwise, every successful platform has failed. The type of synergy you are describing, is what builds value for the only people which count... shareholders.
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
> it never felt like it was being done for the benefit of the users of each platform. Cynically, I'm yet to see any crypto that benefits anyone but the people that invented it (they benefit the most) and the savvy traders trying to make a buck (and sometimes succeeding at the expense of others).
- nscalf 5y ago
  This is a pretty uninformed take. There are all sorts of projects made in crypto: collectibles, music, art, gaming, loans, mortgages, debit cards with rewards, social media, wifi networks, anti-fraud, food security, etc. And many projects have a large donation component to them.
  - user-the-name 5y ago
    All of which don't "benefit anyone but the people that invented it and the savvy traders trying to make a buck". He got it right the first time, and you are just falling for the dishonest rationalisations of crypto scammers.
    - nscalf 5y ago
      Products don’t benefit the user? Honestly, what is your stance here? It seems like your stance is “crypto bad”. Yes, people who made a product benefited, as did investors. How is that dishonest? Audius has 5m monthly users, please explain why 5 million people use something they get no benefit from.
      - InitialLastName 5y ago
        Looking at the Audius website, I see no reason that service needs blockchain to function, which brings us to the final function of blockchain: Blockchain as a marketing gimmick.
  - boringg 5y ago
    Says the people who are downstream of the founders/traders of crypto but upstream the final bag holders. The game is - the more people/demand who come into the place, the greater the asset value. Earliest in benefit the most. Sure there are benefits from crypto (but those are mostly a distraction for its core use case and a way for murky individuals to validate investments to the real bagholders) but the costs and the model works in that you keep having to find more people to buy into the asset class in order to validate the most recent purchases. In traditional equities - you get some kind of return on your investment through traditionally dividends/share buybacks from profits generated from the business - right now its a lot of capital appreciation not to dissimilar to what I described above (i.e. TINA)
    - nscalf 5y ago
      I was talking about using products, not investing in some coin. So the bag holder argument doesn’t apply here, these are people directly getting services. But many coins have mechanisms to give dividends in the form of their coin, which have liquid trading markets. You can say they’re being propped up by the next buyer, but many of these are used by the product as “gas” for transactions, creating a real use based demand economy. I’ll readily admit that speculation has massively inflated these markets past their fundamental value, but that’s not unique to cryptocurrency.
      - fwip 5y ago
        What other currencies do people trust that have been "massively inflated" by speculation?
    - giantrobot 5y ago
      > Says the people who are downstream of the founders/traders of crypto but upstream the final bag holders. Look man, cryptocurrency isn't some kind of pyramid scheme! It's just a bisected cube!
  - floatboth 5y ago
    One day it's a project start-up with A Whitepaper™, the next day it's just the word "penis": https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/7tn6ld/a_shitcoin_startup_called_prodeum_just/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/7tn6ld/a_shitcoin... "Anti-fraud" is especially funny considering how fraudulent the whole cryptocurrency space is. But anyway, to quote Nicholas Weaver (https://youtu.be/xCHab0dNnj4?t=1667 https://youtu.be/xCHab0dNnj4?t=1667), "[the people proposing those projects] are never actually even able to even articulate what the hard problems are, like what data, what formats, what honesty, who's adding the data, what enforcement — shoving garbage into an append-only ledger doesn't solve your problems!"
- golergka 5y ago
  Bitcoin benefits drug users and dealers every single day, and have been doing it for almost 10 years. May be in US it's different, but there's just no street drug trade anymore around here. If you want to buy weed, you have to buy bitcoin, in some shape or form.
  - Frondo 5y ago
    Not saying I ever buy illegal drugs, but my venmo history is full of people buying $80 of pizza or $150 of sushi -- this seems to be seller's preference, as far as I can tell. No one in my rather wide extended circle has ever tried to or even suggested using crypto for these kinds of transactions.
    - technobabbler 5y ago
      Wow, your weed dealer is a very multi-talented person.
    - whimsicalism 5y ago
      That's because marijuana still counts as a drug. In young professional circles for non-marijuana drugs, there is definitely a major crypto backend even if you only deal with the middleman.
    - throwaway946513 5y ago
      Sushi bars be expensive.
    - tayo42 5y ago
      Going from cash to crypto is pretty expensive I think. I tried to do a large transaction thought crypto might work but it was going to be a couple hundred just to convert it
      - xur17 5y ago
        It's really not. Coinbase pro charges ~0.5% on cash to crypto trades. Strike charges a very small spread on cash to bitcoin, and you can send directly to other lightning nodes for < $0.01. USDC can be converted from / to USD for free on Coinbase.
- 0des 5y ago
  > benefits anyone but the people that invented it Same could be said about social networks.
  - user-the-name 5y ago
    That makes no sense whatsoever.
    - elliekelly 5y ago
      Sure it does. I think there’s a fairly solid argument to be made that social media is a net negative for humanity. It’s “good” for the small group of people who make a lot of money but for most people it’s not a positive. It maybe falls somewhere between alcohol (not great but a lot people enjoy it in moderation) and prescription opioids (predatory and misleading by design).
  - 8ytecoder 5y ago
    Social media has downsides but that doesn’t mean it’s useless or has never been useful. It did connect people. There was a time when you lose touch with your high school friends pretty much forever when you move for college and then a different city.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - 0des 5y ago
      There was a time that cigarettes 'calmed the nerves' as well. Almost universally, nobody thinks social media is a one way street of mostly-positive outcomes.
      - rocketbop 5y ago
        > nobody thinks social media is a one way street of mostly-positive outcomes. What is?
- webdoodle 5y ago
  It's a ponzi scheme
- phreack 5y ago
  It's a lifesaver in countries with rampant inflation where they forbid you to buy currencies from other countries. Literally in some cases.
  - fennecfoxen 5y ago
    Which countries are those? China, where it's been outlawed? Is the value mostly in the laws being easier to circumvent?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - politician 5y ago
      Are you implying that there is some Moral Good in compliance with laws that prevent you from escaping an inflationary environment damning you and your loved ones to starvation?
      - fennecfoxen 5y ago
        I'm trying to figure out what people are actually talking about
  - skytreader 5y ago
    So, it's easy to find a list of the countries with the highest inflation rates, but which of those countries actually forbid individuals from acquiring foreign currency? I assume you have a verifiable example? Not to mention, for an everyman living in one of these countries, how feasible is it to actually participate in crypto to the point where it is useful in day-to-day living? How much upfront investment will it cost? How much ongoing investment? Will the local merchants accept crypto? Will they do so any time soon? (I'm honestly not fond of crypto but I also honestly have no idea about these questions, which seem practical to know before buying into an "advantage" of crypto.) Venezuela aside, naturally. Because the way this statement comes across to me is is that crypto is a viable alternative even without government oversight and/or precisely because of its lack of central authority. Venezuela's crypto has support all the way from the top.
sporkland 5y ago
Would you critique Musk in a similar way? Honest question, because it's eerie how you could swap Dorsey for Musk and the statements would still apply but seem much less true.
- itsoktocry 5y ago
  >Would you critique Musk in a similar way? Absolutely. Musk's companies manage to get stuff done, but are any of them particularly "well run"?
  - meepmorp 5y ago
    SpaceX, largely due to Gwynne Shotwell.
- gonehome 5y ago
  Yeah, musk is the perfect counter example. In the brief time he left Tesla in someone else’s hands the other CEO almost killed it. I'm also skeptical of Jack's claim about founder led companies. When you're the exec handing things over you'd have to make some comment like that to show your trust is entirely behind the new person. I don't really buy it though. Also I thought Evan Williams and Biz Stone were the Twitter founders? Maybe I'm forgetting the history.
  - madamelic 5y ago
    > Also I thought Evan Williams and Biz Stone were the Twitter founders? He was a founder...ish. From reading his Wikipedia, it seems like it was an x.com / PayPal situation. He joined their company to help them with the idea then when they spun Twitter out, he became CEO. From digging in a bit deeper, the lineage of Twitter seems fascinating. It seems like it was the result of the companies of the co-founders putting together that created something even better than their own parts.
  - sporkland 5y ago
    There's a whole book, "Hatching Twitter" about the sordid founding of Twitter and how Dorsey and Noah Glass were the main originators of the concept at oOdeo, then Ev eventually fired them and removed them from the history. Only to have Dorsey come back later and remove him. Seems like a bunch of people had a hand in creating it in various ways.
alksjdalkj 5y ago
>> you're not going to be able to give the focus a solo CEO is. > I agree. As much as he tried to justify the dual CEO roles, it never made any sense. If I remember correctly he was originally going to step away from Twitter to focus on Square, but then Twitter couldn't find a replacement and basically begged him to stay.
mise_en_place 5y ago
More charitably, he may have been suckered by the crypto Ponzi. Many intelligent people have.

b112 5y ago

but it never felt like it was being done for the benefit of the users of each platform. The point of platforms is not to benefit the users, otherwise, every successful platform has failed. The type of synergy you are describing, is what builds value for the only people which count... shareholders.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago

> it never felt like it was being done for the benefit of the users of each platform. Cynically, I'm yet to see any crypto that benefits anyone but the people that invented it (they benefit the most) and the savvy traders trying to make a buck (and sometimes succeeding at the expense of others).

nscalf 5y ago
This is a pretty uninformed take. There are all sorts of projects made in crypto: collectibles, music, art, gaming, loans, mortgages, debit cards with rewards, social media, wifi networks, anti-fraud, food security, etc. And many projects have a large donation component to them.
- user-the-name 5y ago
  All of which don't "benefit anyone but the people that invented it and the savvy traders trying to make a buck". He got it right the first time, and you are just falling for the dishonest rationalisations of crypto scammers.
  - nscalf 5y ago
    Products don’t benefit the user? Honestly, what is your stance here? It seems like your stance is “crypto bad”. Yes, people who made a product benefited, as did investors. How is that dishonest? Audius has 5m monthly users, please explain why 5 million people use something they get no benefit from.
    - InitialLastName 5y ago
      Looking at the Audius website, I see no reason that service needs blockchain to function, which brings us to the final function of blockchain: Blockchain as a marketing gimmick.
- boringg 5y ago
  Says the people who are downstream of the founders/traders of crypto but upstream the final bag holders. The game is - the more people/demand who come into the place, the greater the asset value. Earliest in benefit the most. Sure there are benefits from crypto (but those are mostly a distraction for its core use case and a way for murky individuals to validate investments to the real bagholders) but the costs and the model works in that you keep having to find more people to buy into the asset class in order to validate the most recent purchases. In traditional equities - you get some kind of return on your investment through traditionally dividends/share buybacks from profits generated from the business - right now its a lot of capital appreciation not to dissimilar to what I described above (i.e. TINA)
  - nscalf 5y ago
    I was talking about using products, not investing in some coin. So the bag holder argument doesn’t apply here, these are people directly getting services. But many coins have mechanisms to give dividends in the form of their coin, which have liquid trading markets. You can say they’re being propped up by the next buyer, but many of these are used by the product as “gas” for transactions, creating a real use based demand economy. I’ll readily admit that speculation has massively inflated these markets past their fundamental value, but that’s not unique to cryptocurrency.
    - fwip 5y ago
      What other currencies do people trust that have been "massively inflated" by speculation?
  - giantrobot 5y ago
    > Says the people who are downstream of the founders/traders of crypto but upstream the final bag holders. Look man, cryptocurrency isn't some kind of pyramid scheme! It's just a bisected cube!
- floatboth 5y ago
  One day it's a project start-up with A Whitepaper™, the next day it's just the word "penis": https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/7tn6ld/a_shitcoin_startup_called_prodeum_just/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/7tn6ld/a_shitcoin... "Anti-fraud" is especially funny considering how fraudulent the whole cryptocurrency space is. But anyway, to quote Nicholas Weaver (https://youtu.be/xCHab0dNnj4?t=1667 https://youtu.be/xCHab0dNnj4?t=1667), "[the people proposing those projects] are never actually even able to even articulate what the hard problems are, like what data, what formats, what honesty, who's adding the data, what enforcement — shoving garbage into an append-only ledger doesn't solve your problems!"
golergka 5y ago
Bitcoin benefits drug users and dealers every single day, and have been doing it for almost 10 years. May be in US it's different, but there's just no street drug trade anymore around here. If you want to buy weed, you have to buy bitcoin, in some shape or form.
- Frondo 5y ago
  Not saying I ever buy illegal drugs, but my venmo history is full of people buying $80 of pizza or $150 of sushi -- this seems to be seller's preference, as far as I can tell. No one in my rather wide extended circle has ever tried to or even suggested using crypto for these kinds of transactions.
  - technobabbler 5y ago
    Wow, your weed dealer is a very multi-talented person.
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    That's because marijuana still counts as a drug. In young professional circles for non-marijuana drugs, there is definitely a major crypto backend even if you only deal with the middleman.
  - throwaway946513 5y ago
    Sushi bars be expensive.
  - tayo42 5y ago
    Going from cash to crypto is pretty expensive I think. I tried to do a large transaction thought crypto might work but it was going to be a couple hundred just to convert it
    - xur17 5y ago
      It's really not. Coinbase pro charges ~0.5% on cash to crypto trades. Strike charges a very small spread on cash to bitcoin, and you can send directly to other lightning nodes for < $0.01. USDC can be converted from / to USD for free on Coinbase.
0des 5y ago
> benefits anyone but the people that invented it Same could be said about social networks.
- user-the-name 5y ago
  That makes no sense whatsoever.
  - elliekelly 5y ago
    Sure it does. I think there’s a fairly solid argument to be made that social media is a net negative for humanity. It’s “good” for the small group of people who make a lot of money but for most people it’s not a positive. It maybe falls somewhere between alcohol (not great but a lot people enjoy it in moderation) and prescription opioids (predatory and misleading by design).
- 8ytecoder 5y ago
  Social media has downsides but that doesn’t mean it’s useless or has never been useful. It did connect people. There was a time when you lose touch with your high school friends pretty much forever when you move for college and then a different city.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - 0des 5y ago
    There was a time that cigarettes 'calmed the nerves' as well. Almost universally, nobody thinks social media is a one way street of mostly-positive outcomes.
    - rocketbop 5y ago
      > nobody thinks social media is a one way street of mostly-positive outcomes. What is?
webdoodle 5y ago
It's a ponzi scheme
phreack 5y ago
It's a lifesaver in countries with rampant inflation where they forbid you to buy currencies from other countries. Literally in some cases.
- fennecfoxen 5y ago
  Which countries are those? China, where it's been outlawed? Is the value mostly in the laws being easier to circumvent?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - politician 5y ago
    Are you implying that there is some Moral Good in compliance with laws that prevent you from escaping an inflationary environment damning you and your loved ones to starvation?
    - fennecfoxen 5y ago
      I'm trying to figure out what people are actually talking about
- skytreader 5y ago
  So, it's easy to find a list of the countries with the highest inflation rates, but which of those countries actually forbid individuals from acquiring foreign currency? I assume you have a verifiable example? Not to mention, for an everyman living in one of these countries, how feasible is it to actually participate in crypto to the point where it is useful in day-to-day living? How much upfront investment will it cost? How much ongoing investment? Will the local merchants accept crypto? Will they do so any time soon? (I'm honestly not fond of crypto but I also honestly have no idea about these questions, which seem practical to know before buying into an "advantage" of crypto.) Venezuela aside, naturally. Because the way this statement comes across to me is is that crypto is a viable alternative even without government oversight and/or precisely because of its lack of central authority. Venezuela's crypto has support all the way from the top.

sporkland 5y ago

Would you critique Musk in a similar way? Honest question, because it's eerie how you could swap Dorsey for Musk and the statements would still apply but seem much less true.

itsoktocry 5y ago
>Would you critique Musk in a similar way? Absolutely. Musk's companies manage to get stuff done, but are any of them particularly "well run"?
- meepmorp 5y ago
  SpaceX, largely due to Gwynne Shotwell.
gonehome 5y ago
Yeah, musk is the perfect counter example. In the brief time he left Tesla in someone else’s hands the other CEO almost killed it. I'm also skeptical of Jack's claim about founder led companies. When you're the exec handing things over you'd have to make some comment like that to show your trust is entirely behind the new person. I don't really buy it though. Also I thought Evan Williams and Biz Stone were the Twitter founders? Maybe I'm forgetting the history.
- madamelic 5y ago
  > Also I thought Evan Williams and Biz Stone were the Twitter founders? He was a founder...ish. From reading his Wikipedia, it seems like it was an x.com / PayPal situation. He joined their company to help them with the idea then when they spun Twitter out, he became CEO. From digging in a bit deeper, the lineage of Twitter seems fascinating. It seems like it was the result of the companies of the co-founders putting together that created something even better than their own parts.
- sporkland 5y ago
  There's a whole book, "Hatching Twitter" about the sordid founding of Twitter and how Dorsey and Noah Glass were the main originators of the concept at oOdeo, then Ev eventually fired them and removed them from the history. Only to have Dorsey come back later and remove him. Seems like a bunch of people had a hand in creating it in various ways.

alksjdalkj 5y ago

>> you're not going to be able to give the focus a solo CEO is. > I agree. As much as he tried to justify the dual CEO roles, it never made any sense. If I remember correctly he was originally going to step away from Twitter to focus on Square, but then Twitter couldn't find a replacement and basically begged him to stay.

mise_en_place 5y ago

More charitably, he may have been suckered by the crypto Ponzi. Many intelligent people have.