I love this stuff - bitcoin, ethereum, blockchain technology - and what the future holds.
Abigail Johnson
We set up a small bitcoin and ethereum mining operation... that miraculously now is actually making a lot of money.
We need to come up with use cases for this technology that drive clear benefits for individuals and institutions - these are our customers. Too often we see bitcoin and blockchain technologies as solutions in search of a problem. We don't just need these systems to be technically better than the alternatives - we need them to be more user-friendly.
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.
Adam Draper
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Bitcoin is really a fascinating example of how human beings create value, and is not always rational... tt is not a rational currency in that case.
You have to really stretch your imagination to infer what the intrinsic value of Bitcoin is. I haven't been able to do it. Maybe somebody else can.
I do not understand where the backing of Bitcoin is coming from. There is no fundamental issue of capabilities of repaying it in anything which is universally acceptable, which is either intrinsic value of the currency or the credit or trust of the individual who is issuing the money, whether it's a government or an individual.
It's hard to predict the future, but some people think that Bitcoin could do to finance what the Internet did to communications.
I just spent the last 8 months working on the second edition of 'Mastering Bitcoin,' and I couldn't even scratch the surface of all the innovation that is happening in BTC.
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.
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.
In truth, the best Bitcoin can hope for is to be a second-rate version of gold, if that.
The blockchain concept was pioneered within the context of crypto-currency Bitcoin, but engineers have imagined many other ways for distributed ledger technology to streamline the world. Stock exchanges and big banks, for example, are looking at blockchain-type systems as trading settlement platforms.
We think of bitcoin as mobile. It's not one company; it's broad.
Bitcoin is a way to have programmable scarcity. The blockchain is the data structure that records the transfer of scarce objects.
Tokenization applies to scarce assets. Today, the most appropriate thing to tokenize is something that's purely digital. Bitcoin and ethereum are the canonical.
Conceptually, we believe that embedded mining will ultimately establish bitcoin as a fundamental system resource on par with CPU, bandwidth, hard drive space, and RAM.
We believe the most significant long-term application of bitcoin may be reducing the upfront cost of internet-connected devices to make them more accessible for the developing world.
There's a tiny number of Bitcoin wizards and an enormous number of smart developers that have no onramp to Bitcoin. We need to make that onramp easier.
Every time you load a webpage is a HTTP request. That's a lot of HTTP requests. If you are earning bitcoin on every HTTP request, that could be a lot of earned bitcoins.
I'm interested in businesses that take digital bits and turn them into interfaces for physical atoms. I'm also interested in drones, Bitcoin, and 3D printing.
Isn't the purpose of bitcoin mining simply to get rich - or not, as the case may be? Well, at 21, we are less concerned with bitcoin as a financial instrument and more interested in bitcoin as a protocol - and particularly in the industrial uses of bitcoin enabled by embedded mining.
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.
Essentially, if you decide to sell a widget using BitPay, and you sell the widget for $100, in Bitcoin you get $100. And so it doesn't matter what the price does the next minute or the next hour.
Bitcoin is one of the most viral concepts I've ever encountered.
That's a term that I really like - 'permissionless innovation' - because anybody who has an idea and has a solution can tap into or can leverage the Bitcoin blockchain.
People have been scared off Bitcoin by the fact that you needed to put your money in an unregulated overseas platform that has been cut off by banks and scrutinized by the Fed. We are looking to remove the pain points and create a way to invest that is faster and more secure.
We are very excited about the use of blockchain, whether it's Bitcoin or not, but we are as enthusiastic as ever about Bitcoin as a global currency and, really more importantly, Bitcoin as a global financial rail.
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.
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.
You just can't bifurcate bitcoin currency from the technology. Bitcoin will always need a monetary base.
