For those who don't understand what the website is about:
Square (and other related companies like Tidal, CashApp, Spiral and TBD54566975, not exactly subsidiaries but sibling companies under a holding company) is changing their name to Block, as in blockchain, as they seem to be going more towards cryptocurrency.
It's similar to Facebook changing their name to Meta for wanting to create a "metaverse," analogously Square is also changing their name.
Interesting to see that Jack Dorsey (who is CEO of Square and until recently was CEO of Twitter as well) probably left Twitter to focus more on Block.
> Jack Dorsey ... probably left Twitter to focus more on Block.
I don't think he was fired by the Twitter board, exactly. But given the increasing conflict of interest between being CEO of Twitter and his use of Twitter as a place to promote crypto (thereby increasing the value of whatever interest he personally or Square has in crypto), it's not hard to imagine that the Twitter board told him that it was time to end one activity or the other. Though it looked sudden from the outside, it's clear this was all carefully orchestrated.
Moreover, certain Twitter investors had (rightly) been complaining about the arrangement for a while.
Surely the board cares much more about the abysmal performance of Twitter's stock price compared to other big tech names than whether Dorsey tweets about bitcoin.
Except Facebook changed their name to distract people with a shiny new thing, hoping they will see that and forget about the other issue.
The square rebranding too doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Bitcoins will fit naturally into their line of products without rebranding. Of course rebranding with a bitcoin related word is a cheap way to achieve a stock bump. So probably smart in that sense.
The fact that Facebook launched the Meta thing at a time when they were under scrutiny means they probably hoped to distract from what was putting them in the news, but I don’t think they did it just for that reason. Like, the whole whistleblower thing definitely concerns them and they want it to go away, but it doesn’t feel like enough to warrant conjuring a permanent name change and a whole video manifesto in a week. They were definitely already planning on doing this. It feels likely to me that this is part of a multi-year high level strategy to picot towards VR and crypto.
That doesn’t mean I believe in it, I think there’s a lot that’s silly about Meta, and I’m a big believer in the ability of powerful people to do silly and misguided things. That may be what’s happening here. Consider that Jack may not possess any insights about this stuff that aren’t available to us.
Sorry, a little OT: This is the third webpage that literally crashed my browser (Firefox) in the last two days. I also noted some strange kind of flashing on other webpages as well. Is Firefox gone south within the last update or it's something unrelated? Does this also happen to any of you?
I disabled WebGL and WebGPU in my primary browser. I simply see a blank page with the words "Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (developer guidance)".
You can do the same too. Most webpages don't need fancy graphics. CSS transforms and animations (which can be 3D) are fancy enough for me.
*Square, Inc. is referred to as “Block” on this website. The legal name “Square, Inc.” is expected to be legally changed to “Block, Inc.” on or about December 10, 2021, upon satisfying all applicable legal requirements.
