Pave your own path and be fearless.
Adam Draper
Energy and bitcoin work really well together because you can pay out in micro-transaction units. As the energy gets used, they pay out, and it's by the kilowatt rather than by the month.
If money was being invented now, it wouldn't be designed to look like cash or credit cards. It would look more like Bitcoin.
I saw Bitcoin as an actual market opportunity: as a trillion-dollar marketplace with long-term potential.
I describe Bitcoin as 'the Skype of money.'
I trust bitcoin more than I trust my bank.
Bitcoin is here to stay. There would be a hacker uproar to anyone who attempted to take credit for the patent of cryptocurrency. And I wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of hacker fury.
A startup is literally just a series of unfortunate events where you failed, failed, failed, and failed until you succeed.
When we announced that we were going to support Bitcoin companies, we became a great lightning rod for activity and fun.
Bitcoin and the block chain enables a whole new way to incentivize and transact, so change the world with this new tool. Create and build! Surprise us with an idea we have never seen before.
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.
Bitcoin has so much potential, and that's why the believers are trying to facilitate its use as a currency, so people use to buy things and spread it around more.
The blockchain does one thing: It replaces third-party trust with mathematical proof that something happened.
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.
China just banned ICO fundraising. They did Silicon Valley and the U.S. a favor - now we get first dibs.
There are very few fundamental shifts in global infrastructure that can happen in our life times. The financial infrastructure is one of them, and the Blockchain is changing the way we think about the transfer of value.
I think that the future of currency is digital, and Bitcoin has a good shot at being the currency of the future.
What bitcoin does better than the current financial system is it's a better stored value globally. There are a lot of countries that really don't trust their banks or their currency, and bitcoin is an alternative.
What's really happening is that every bank in the country is experimenting with the blockchain and experimenting with bitcoin to figure out where the value is. For the first time ever, they're working hand in hand with startups. Banks are asking startups for help to build products.
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.
The next phase of the journey is to move from speculation to actual use cases - people getting into Bitcoin because they want to use it.
Most people hoard their money - just keep it in the bank. Bitcoin will really take off when people start spending it, creating a velocity of money.
I always believe that people can learn a broader skill set. You need good technology and solving a big problem. I always think that, at it's core, it's solving a problem; you're not building technology for the sake of technology.
I find it difficult to turn down an entrepreneur who's both passionate and knowledgeable about their space.
I think there will always be need of trusted voices in the investment community, but what the ICO markets are showing is that the world has incredible demand for future-looking projects!
I think that governments are going to get disrupted by the blockchain. I think in the same way that the Internet forced everyone to evolve, the Blockchain is going to change the game again.
For Bitcoin, if it becomes a thing, it will become an enormous thing. It will be world-changing. But if it's nothing, it's nothing. There is no in between.
No one has ever raised capital because their pitch deck was pretty. A lot of people have raised capital because they were over-prepared, knew where their business was going, and were able to articulate that through a pitch alongside a pitch deck.
In the future, when people look back at the early days of Bitcoin, they'll say, 'It was so obvious that the ability to move money anywhere, instantly, at near-zero cost would be a huge success.
People wanted Bitcoin to live so much, they basically willed it back into existence. That showed me how passionate this community was about it.
