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Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are already trustless - any machine can accept it from any other, securely. They are (nearly) free. They are global - no central bank required, and any machine can speak the language.
Bitcoin has the potential to destroy credit cards and banks as we know it. Maybe that is a good thing or a bad thing, but I like the idea that if someone needs to remit payments, they can do it without being gouged.
Our view is that consumer finance - what people think of as retail finance - that arena is ripe for disruption. Bitcoin is absolutely a core platform and asset format that we are dependent on to build this business.
People think about Bitcoin incorrectly. They think about it as currency or about gold or hoarding, speculation, about how much money do you make. When really, what it is is an API for programmable cash transactions.
Sir Richard Branson started out as a small business owner and now owns a conglomerate that will give you a ride to the moon. If you pay for your ride with bitcoin, you'll be using the first truly universal currency!
If you are not an accredited investor, you only have one option: to buy and hold bitcoin on your own. The process of acquiring bitcoin is risky and requires a lot of due diligence to navigate the landscape properly.
It's completely reasonable, even if some Bitcoin currency purists wouldn't like it, to have credit and debit card payments denominated in Bitcoin rather than dollars, and net settled on Bitcoin instead of on Fedwire.
There is no more reason to believe that Bitcoin will stand the test of time than that governments will protect the value of government-created money, although Bitcoin is newer, and we always look at babies with hope.
Success of bitcoin and the exchanges that deal in it could be interpreted by some to mean the demise of central banks, Wall Street, and the Washington insiders who trade on inside information and market manipulation.
You really want some natural way for people to get Bitcoins, as part of their paycheck or some other activity so they can turn around and spend them. It's much better if the Bitcoin economy is a self-contained thing.
Bitcoin is a bank in cyberspace, run by incorruptible software, offereing a global, affordable, simple an dsecure savings account to billions of people that don't have the option or desire to run their own hedge fund.
Unlike Bitcoin or email, our financial institutions and payment systems today are proprietary. This limits the ability for consumers to easily switch between payment providers and creates less competition for services.
It's important not to think about Bitcoin as a replacement for cash or gold or something that works alongside that; it's to think of it as programmable money. And we just cannot even imagine what that will be used for.
Despite popular belief, Bitcoin is a bad medium of exchange for people that value financial privacy because of the transparent ledger that reveals an address, timestamp, and amount for every transaction on the network.
By design, Bitcoin is a scarce resource with a predictable supply of new issuance. And it is this scarcity and predictable supply that make it so attractive as an underlying asset to bind to economic activity and trade.
When the Internet first launched, you had all these newspapers saying that the Internet was only used by bad people, to do bad things and what was the point of it. But the Internet changed everything, just like Bitcoin will.
Application-specific tokens, or app-tokens, are built on top of existing general-purpose blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum. For the first time, open-source project creators can directly monetize their open-source network.
Gold actually has properties - you can use gold for all sorts of things. People value gold for the metal. Nobody values bitcoin for the bitcoin; they value it because they believe that they can exchange it for something else.
The bitcoin world is this new ecosystem where it doesn't cost that much to start a new bitcoin company, it doesn't cost much to start owning bitcoin either, and it is a much more efficient way of moving money around the world.
When the Bitcoin white paper emerged in 2008, it was completely revolutionary. The amount of concepts that had to come together in just the right way - computer science, cryptography, and economic incentives - was astonishing.
The bitcoin protocol is about mining bitcoin, not pricing bitcoin. There is nothing in the protocol about establishing a market price for bitcoin; you need a market for that, but what if all the exchange markets are shut down?
The Internet will continue to be valuable so long as it is the most efficient mechanism for transferring data. Bitcoin's value is the same: It will remain as long as it is the most efficient mechanism for transferring ownership.
Virtual currency, where it's called a bitcoin vs. a U.S. dollar, that's going to be stopped. No government will ever support a virtual currency that goes around borders and doesn't have the same controls. It's not going to happen.
PayPal came within an inch of being shut down by regulators when they started. The feds seizing the Dwolla account and stealing the money that is owned by Mt. Gox customers is more proof that Bitcoin is the superior payment system.
If you're someone in the business of verifying transactions on a proprietary network, the invention of Bitcoin cannot be safely ignored. It will change or disrupt the providers of most proprietary payment networks in the coming years.
That's the last thing on Earth you should think about... There's just a whole lot of things that aren't going to work for you. Figure out what they are and avoid them like the plague. And one of them is bitcoin... It is total insanity.
Bitcoin is coming from a bunch of young computer nerds who saw this thing and thought it was neat. A lot of the early bitcoiners are 19-year-old kids, still living at home with their parents, and they don't have any business experience.
That was the moment I wanted to use bitcoin: when I saw Harriet Tubman on a $20 bill. It's like, when you see all the slave movies, it's like, why you gotta keep reminding us about slavery? Why don't you put Michael Jordan on a $20 bill?
Blockchain assets derive value from their usefulness. Bitcoin has value because people value the payment network. BTC is required to use the network, so people demand it. If Bitcoin continues to be useful, it will continue to have value.
When the actual Bitcoin network launched in 2009, no one knew about it, and many of those who did thought it would surely fail. Just to make sure the thing worked, the scripting language in Bitcoin was intentionally extremely restrictive.
Bitcoin seems to be a very promising idea. I like the idea of basing security on the assumption that the CPU power of honest participants outweighs that of the attacker. It is a very modern notion that exploits the power of the long tail.
In 2008, Bitcoin was mysteriously introduced to the world in an obscure, technical paper written under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. By late 2013, the financial press was filled with reportage on Bitcoin and its dramatic price increase.
The Dwolla incident was to be expected. The government will go after sites that it thinks are supposed to register as money transmitters. Some Bitcoin companies will register as such, and some won't, but business will carry on regardless.
I am really surprised bitcoin isn't more popular in India, given the strong gold culture here. I call it Gold 2.0. It has all the attributes other than the fact that it isn't tangible, and tangibility is less important in the digital age.
Bitcoin is not an actual physical coin, and if computers are shut down, you can't buy or sell them. That's why nothing will ever replace gold and silver coins themselves, and all investors should have them at home or in a safe deposit box.
Our mission is to accelerate the development of a better financial system; it's not just development of a better Bitcoin financial system, and so we want to back the best teams, who have the biggest ideas, unique solutions to big problems.
I want to help create the world's first global currency built on the Internet and built on open platforms and standards such as Bitcoin, and I want to build a financial services institution on top of that. That's what I'm doing with Circle.
As the platform and protocol become more ingrained in society, get built into products and services, and basically become more of the mesh of society, just like the Internet, companies and people will need to own Bitcoin to play on its rails.
Bitcoin is mostly about anonymous transactions, and I don't think over time that's a good way to go. I'm a huge believe in digital currency... but doing it on an anonymous basis I think that leads to some abuses, so I'm not involved in Bitcoin.
There will be many types of assets codified into the blockchain, and they are all not just going to be on the bitcoin blockchain - it's going to be a number of different assets here. And the best way to invest in that is a diversified portfolio.
Bitcoin offers one service: securely time-stamped, scripted transactions. Everything else is built on the edge-devices as an application. Bitcoin allows any application to be developed independently, without permission, on the edge of the network.
I think the technology will get bigger and the price of Bitcoin will go up, so I'm speculating to increase my purchasing power. But I don't intend to sell the Bitcoin. I intend to hold it until there's a day where I can just use Bitcoin completely.
The world is a global economy. I thought, 'It's a bummer we don't have a unifying currency.' Then I saw Bitcoin had already had a crash and had the resistance to recover. The community was strong enough to push it through again. That's really exciting.
As people want to move money around the world, they're going to be moving in and out of bitcoin quickly, but they're still going to own it for some period of time... and the size of that working capital requirement will grow as the global economy grows.
Facebook is like the Internet: a large company and an application. Bitcoin is a protocol for decentralisation, so you could build a decentralised company on top of it, a stock market. It's an Internet of ownership, so it's not quite a direct comparison.
Assess Bitcoins? All you can do is examine the trading patterns, which do not provide a real analysis of any underlying economic value. The economics of investments are not solely based on supply and demand, and that is all that goes into Bitcoin prices.
If you haven't used Bitcoin first-hand, you may not get the inherent advantage of a quicker appreciation and understanding of its potential. Seeing assets move swiftly without intermediaries is an eye opening experience, and that is just a starting point.
The ledger, the distributed database - it's called a Blockchain - is held in the cloud by all the parties involved. It can't be broken by any of them. It's cryptographically too strong. You would have to compromise the entire network to take over Bitcoin.
Bitcoin's revolution: an impossible-to-counterfeit digital store of value that can be used as money, that has no sovereign, or central bank involved, that can be sent anywhere instantly at virtually no cost, is irresistible. Anyone who uses it is converted.
There's a lot of thought that bitcoin will be a huge threat to existing tax systems or existing ways governments have of controlling currency flows across their border. I personally think governments will do what governments have always done: they will adapt.