In an interview with CBC News, Square CEO Jack Dorsey dropped an interesting hint about his company’s future relationship with bitcoin. Speaking about concerns that Square might face stiff competition from the forthcoming Apple Pay mobile point-of-sale system, Dorsey said: “We’re building a register so that sellers can accept a credit card, so they can accept cash, so they can accept a cheque, so they can accept bitcoin and so they can accept any form of payment that comes across the counter including future ones and burgeoning ones like Apple Pay.”
This is not the first time Square has hinted at a forthcoming bitcoin integration for their register product. The company already allows bitcoin payments in their Etsy-like Square Market, seen by many as a test run for an eventual full-scale integration. Dorsey did not offer a timeline for the possible integration, although such payment would be relatively easy to incorporate into their app-based register system via industry standard QR codes.
The announcement might also be somewhat strategically timed, given that eBay-owned PayPal is currently making a push into the offline world with their own retail point-of-sale service and is becoming an increasingly common payment option on existing digital POS services. With PayPal already trumpeting their looming bitcoin payment system through their new partnership with Coinbase, it would be strange indeed for Square to not integrate the same payment option as the app-based register competition heats up.
