The assertion by Jack Dorsey, co-founder and CEO of Twitter Inc. and Square Inc. in July 2021 has, tragically, not aged well. Not with Russia in Ukraine and reminders of the resulting horrors being disseminated daily.

But Dorsey, long a proponent of cryptocurrency, put the sentiment out there, long before Vladimir Putin mobilized: Bitcoin could be a force for world peace.

His exact statement on “The B Word” webinar was as follows:

“My hope is that it creates world peace or helps create world peace. We have all these monopolies off-balance and the individual doesn’t have power and the amount of cost and distraction that comes from our monetary system today is real and it takes away attention from the bigger problems. All these distractions that we have to deal with on a daily basis take away from those bigger goals that affect every single person on this planet and increasingly so. You fix that foundational level and everything above it improves in such a dramatic way. It’s going to be long-term but my hope is definitely peace.”

Certainly we can all hope, but certainly there is no shortage of bitcoin skeptics, either. Consider multi-billionaire Warren Buffett, the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, who once decried the cryptocurrency as “rat poison squared.” 

“When you buy non-productive assets,” he once told CNBC, “all you’re counting on is whether the next person is going to pay you more because they’re even more excited about another next person coming along. But the asset itself is creating nothing.”

Peter Schiff, CEO and chief strategist for Euro Pacific Capital, is likewise skeptical about the future of bitcoin … as well as the dollar. But he said in one interview that he believes “the bitcoin bubble will pop before the dollar bubble,” and that it is more likely that there will be “a cryptocurrency crisis before we have a dollar crisis.”

There was some indication that bitcoin’s bubble had burst when it plunged from a record-high valuation of $69,000 in November 2021 to under $33,000 in January 2022, but it has since stabilized, and many experts believe its future is bright. One of them, Galaxy Digital founder/CEO Michael Novogratz, told Bloomberg that he believes bitcoin will remain in the $30,000-to-$50,000 range this year, en route to a $500,000 valuation by 2027.

The results of a March 2022 NBC News poll further reflect cryptocurrency’s momentum. The poll showed that 21 percent of Americans had used, traded or invested in crypto, including 42 percent of those between the ages of 18 and 34. Another report, by Checkout.com, showed that four of every 10 in the 18-to-35 age group expressed the intention of using crypto to pay for goods and services in the next year – though only 23 percent of companies plan to offer crypto payment methods before 2024.

Jess Houlgrave, head of strategy for crypto at Checkout.com, told Yahoo Finance that the survey results reflect the fact that cryptocurrency is “maturing and is increasingly being driven by utility, pragmatism and empowerment,” while adding that it could “transform the way people transact” and “potentially reinvent the dynamics of the entire digital economy.”

Still, there remains some misunderstanding of just what cryptocurrency, and bitcoin in particular, is. Bitcoin is the oldest of “at least 10,000” cryptos, dating back to 2009, as Greg Genega, a crypto expert, told PBS in March 2022. He described it as “a digital currency that you can send, receive and store,” and noted that it is secured on a blockchain, a decentralized digital ledger.

He also said bitcoin is the “closest to a stored value or money or actual currency,” as it is divisible, durable, portable and verifiable. There are, in fact, just 21 million bitcoin in circulation, and there will never be more, meaning it is, as Genega said, “very dis-inflationary.”

In 2021 El Salvador became the first country to adopt bitcoin as legal tender (while retaining the U.S. dollar as its national currency), and that nation’s president, Nayib Bukele, recently announced plans to launch bonds backed by bitcoin, in hopes of raising money that would be put toward infrastructure and other projects. 

Certainly there is some degree of skepticism toward going all in on bitcoin, but Bukele believes it will help El Salvador’s unbanked population. Because cryptos operate without oversight from a central authority like a bank, transactions are not subject to the sort of fees that, for example, traditional money transfers might be.

Yes, there will always be questions about bitcoin and other cryptos. Yes, there will always be skeptics, like Warren Buffett and others. But it seems safe to say that bitcoin is here to stay. It has disrupted the financial landscape, and will continue to do so. It’s just a question of degree.