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.
My view is that the bitcoin is in its very early days, and it is an artificial currency. But whether it is creating new money, whether it is sustainable, whether it would survive - I have many questions about it.
I believe that Bitcoin is going to change the way that everything works. I want entrepreneurs to tell me how its going to change. Build the equivalent of an Iron Man suit with Bitcoin.
I think it's going to end up a lot like the Internet. Some countries try to regulate the Internet - bitcoin will be very much like that. It will be legal, and there will be some countries with currency control.
Bitcoin, in the short or even long term, may turn out be a good investment in the same way that anything that is rare can be considered valuable. Like baseball cards. Or a Picasso.
Digital currency is now a misnomer for Bitcoin. It can be used as currency, but it can be used for many things.
It's really hard to argue that bitcoin doesn't have many legitimate benefits to companies that are legal businesses when you have Dell and Expedia and all these companies now accepting it.
Think of Bitcoin as a bank account in the cloud, and it's completely decentralized: not the Swiss government, not the American government. It's all the participants in the network enforcing.
When we announced that we were going to support Bitcoin companies, we became a great lightning rod for activity and fun.
Ethereum exists because it enables developers to write smart contracts better than Bitcoin in the near-term. Zcash will exist because it will attempt to do privacy better than Bitcoin in the near-term, and the token gives you access to the anonymity protocol.
Coinbase is 'the' brand in the Bitcoin space. Their founder Brian Armstrong was amongst the first good entrepreneurs to emerge in this space. While others championed ideological or underground/illicit interests, Brian saw an opportunity to change the world for the better and build a big business out of it.
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.
The hardest obstacles for Bitcoin companies are banking and regulation.
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.
At the end of the day, what's going to make bitcoin successful is more people making more interesting things, just like the beginning of the Internet.
Ethereum has taken what was a four-function calculator of a programming language in Bitcoin and turned it into a full-fledged computer.
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.
What Bitcoin started is metamorphosing into something bigger: a 'crypto-tech'-driven economy with its own value creation, not unlike the Web's own economy. Welcome to the cryptoconomy.
With Bitcoin, every transaction is publicly verified, so many risks are eliminated, including chargeback fraud or 'friendly fraud.' This is when a customer purchases something online with a credit card; waits to receive the goods or service, then requests a chargeback refund. The bank then forcibly takes the funds out of the merchant's account.
Just as it got easier to use email, it will be easier to use Bitcoin as people invest in it and become more familiar with it.
The rudest possible gift is a gift card. It means you think the person is stupid and has no interests. The only good gift card is Bitcoin. You practically have to be a hacker to know about it.
With greater extensibility and programmability, bitcoin can evolve to enable transformations in how all forms of property are secured and exchanged, how voting and governance function, including spilling into the automation of commercial law, audit, and accounting.
Once Wall Street starts putting money into Bitcoin - we're talking about hundreds of millions, billions of dollars moving in - it's going to have a pretty dramatic effect on the price.
Bitcoin is complex: the entire private and public key issue, the transfers, the mining of bitcoins... but if you tell it as fiction, people would understand and remember.
The only thing I can do with my bitcoin is give it to somebody else.
BitCoin is actually an exploit against network complexity. Not financial networks, or computer networks, or social networks. Networks themselves.
Pretty uniformly, people want the benefits of bitcoin and the blockchain - near-instant transfers, globally available on any Internet-connected device, highly secure, and nearly-free value transfers.
Bitcoin is here to stay.