A crypto-loving social media billionaire is flexing his influence again, and I’m not talking about Elon Musk. Instead, I’m thinking of Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Block and the cofounder of Twitter, which Musk is rapidly running into the ground.
Dorsey has occupied many roles over the years, including fashion influencer. But his latest one is legal champion for the Bitcoin community. That was on display this month in a London court where Dorsey is footing the bill for the defense of Bitcoin developers who are being sued by Craig Wright, who has for years falsely claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto.
I spoke with Jess Jonas, head of the Bitcoin Legal Defense Fund, the Dorsey-backed group assisting the developers. She explained that Wright claims to have lost some Bitcoin and that the developers owe him a fiduciary duty to write code to help him recover his coins—a cockamamie notion in the first place, but even more so given that Bitcoin is based on open-source software. Despite the absurdity of the claim, and Wright’s reputation as a scoundrel and a liar, the case has gotten some traction with the U.K. High Court and represents what Jonas says is an “existential” threat to software.
Jonas added that for the Bitcoin developers, who are mostly based in the U.S., the lawsuit is a source of anxiety and distraction, and not all of them have the resources to defend themselves in a foreign court. So Dorsey’s defense fund—which was set up to protect Bitcoin from a wide variety of legal perils—has proved invaluable.
Dorsey’s contributions to crypto go well beyond the lawsuit, of course. As Block CEO, he has made the company a major crypto player—from adding Bitcoin to its balance sheet to helping build the Lightning Network, which promises to make the currency viable for day-to-day payments. Meanwhile, his Bluesky project, a crypto-friendly, open-source social media protocol, is catching on quickly among those fed up with the toxic kingdoms of Twitter and Facebook.
Contrast Dorsey’s activities with Musk’s ruinous reign at Twitter, where the Tesla CEO has fostered a culture of chaos and abuse—the low point may have come last weekend when Musk fanboys harangued the Auschwitz Memorial after it noted it hadn’t paid for Twitter Blue to get its blue check mark reinstated. All of this underscores how the crypto community, which desperately needs a good guy to champion its interests, needs to think carefully about who its heroes should be. It’s hard to think of a better one than Dorsey.
Jeff John Roberts
jeff.roberts@fortune.com
@jeffjohnroberts
