Former Twitter CEO Rebukes FTX CEO for Saying Bitcoin Is Unsuitable for Payments

Earlier today, Jack Dorsey, who is the co-founder and former CEO of Twitter, as well as the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Block (formerly known as Square), criticized fellow billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, who is the co-founder and CEO of crypto exchange FTX.

interview published in Financial Times (FT) on Monday (May 16), the 30-year-old FTX CEO, whose nickname is “SBF, said:

“The bitcoin network is not a payments network and it is not a scaling network... Things that you’re doing millions of transactions a second with have to be extremely efficient and lightweight and lower energy cost. Proof of stake networks are.“

Although SBF expressed concern over the energy consumption of Bitcoin mining (saying “it has to be the case that we don’t scale this up to the point where we’re spending 100 times as much eventually as we are today on energy costs for mining”), he does believe that Bitcoin is important as a store of value (similar to gold).

Naturally, SBF’s view of Bitcoin upset a large subset of the crypto community (especially Bitcoin maximalists).

Here is one example:

Another example of someone who appeared upset with SBF was Block CEO Jack Dorsey, who could not understand why the FTX CEO had not mentioned during the FT interview that although the Bitcoin network might not be suitable for handling thousands/millions of transactions per second, Bitcoin’s layer 2 scaling solution Lightning Network could scale nicely in the future to handle this level of demand.

SBF replied:

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