I love this stuff - bitcoin, ethereum, blockchain technology - and what the future holds.
Abigail Johnson
Blockchain technology isn't just a more efficient way to settle securities. It will fundamentally change market structures, and maybe even the architecture of the Internet itself.
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.
The blockchain does one thing: It replaces third-party trust with mathematical proof that something happened.
Adam Draper
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.
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.
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.
Belarus will become the first government in the world that opens wide opportunities for the use of blockchain technology.
Alexander Lukashenko
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.
Anthony Scaramucci
Bitcoin is a way to have programmable scarcity. The blockchain is the data structure that records the transfer of scarce objects.
Balaji Srinivasan
The Internet is programmable information. The blockchain is programmable scarcity.
If you deal with information, you need the Internet. If you deal with money, you need to deal with blockchains.
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.
Barry Silbert
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.
Blockchain technology represents a generational opportunity to mutualize database infrastructure across entities within financial services. What that translates into is an enormous cost-saving, risk-reducing, and capital-enhancing opportunity.
Blythe Masters
The blockchain is the financial challenge of our time. It is going to change the way that our financial world operates.
If you think about any multiparty process where shared information is necessary to the completion of transactions, and the coordination of activity and the exchange of value, that's where blockchain technology can be put to good use.
Blockchain technology, or distributed ledger technology, is just a way of using the modern sciences of encryption to enable entities to share a common infrastructure for database retention.
We all want a non-fragmented solution, but the utopian version of a single blockchain to rule them all is undesirable and impractical.
With private chains, you can have a completely known universe of transaction processors. That appeals to financial institutions that are wary of the bitcoin blockchain.
When asked to explain this space, I often ask people to forget pretty much everything you've heard about blockchains, crypto-currencies, and bitcoin, and instead dumb it down a lot and think about something no more complex or intimidating than good old-fashioned database technology.
Blockchain technologies will change transactions in a broad way.
The revolution of blockchain is not going to happen from outside the system; it's going to happen from within the system.
Blockchain is like the new big data or AI - too many people are using it as a buzzword and not focused solving a real problem. We like to call them Blockchain tourists!
I had been exposed to bitcoin early. I thought the consumer application of it felt, to me, further away. I thought there would be faster adoption of the blockchain in the enterprise space and with banks.
Some of the uses being implemented for blockchain could actually work better with a database.
There are a lot of really fabulous things that get done with digital assets and blockchain technologies to reduce friction, to reduce costs, and enable things that weren't possible before.
As I was looking around, to me, what was happening in the blockchain and crypto world was a movement.
You must figure out where the money is coming from. Money won't come find you. There are a ton of genius technologists in the blockchain space, but the harder part is figuring out how to make money.
Solve a real problem. If the blockchain is the best tool, then use it. But never force it. Too many founders love the blockchain and then search for a problem to stick it.
A lot of what I see in blockchain promises to get us as an industry from A to Z. As an investor and entrepreneur, I am constantly on the lookout for how we get from A to B.
Before Blockchain Capital, I was cranking out startups like an incubator.
Blockchain Capital has a global investment mandate so it is very possible that we make an investment in India at some point.
The bitcoin/blockchain protocol has never been compromised. Businesses building applications on top of it run the risk of making mistakes.
Has the Internet changed our lives? Have mobile phones changed our lives? The blockchain is something that is that transformative.
Users and entrepreneurs building new business models off the blockchain means that there are competing interests on how best to scale the network. Linux, also an open source software project, had similar growing pains.
The right way to think about the blockchain is that it's going to replace the entire Internet.
Blockchain Capital was the first dedicated venture fund to invest in crypto and blockchain.
Every smart person that I admire in the world, and those I semi-fear, is focused on this concept of crypto for a reason. They understand that this is the driving force of the fourth industrial revolution: steam engine, electricity, then the microchip - blockchain and crypto is the fourth.
I call the blockchain 'the Internet of value' and 'the Internet of trust.' Because everything becomes trustless. It's a big distributed ledger. Think of it like an Excel file that's being maintained and updated and managed by millions of computers around the world.
The blockchain is going to change everything more than the Internet has.
Before I went to prison, there were not really many blockchain products. It was only bitcoin.
2016 has proven to be the year where the most forward-thinking financial institutions are actually using blockchain technologies for payments and settlement rather than as an experiment.
We don't think the blockchain can do most of what's been ascribed to it. But we're entering the Internet of value - and that is very much underhyped.
Almost any illiquid asset today lends itself well to moving onto the blockchain and becoming tokenized. It will create a deeper market with improved price discovery and should increase the value of those assets.
There is some risk that if the wrong regulatory regime gets adopted in the U.S., then the center of innovation could move to other countries. If blockchains are the next Internet, that would be a very unfortunate development for the U.S.
I have no problem with the financial industry inviting the Trojan Horse of blockchain technology into their walled garden. Because I know how powerful the technology is.
Everything will be tokenized and connected by a blockchain one day.
OpenAI is doing important work by releasing tools which promote AI to be developed in the open. Compute power is largely produced by NVIDIA and Intel and still relatively expensive but openly purchasable. Blockchains may be the key final ingredient by providing massive pools of open training data.
We are on our way to blockchains as the fabric of society - the system for what we own (assets), who we are (identity), how we make decisions (governance), and more in an increasingly digital world. It's going to be a wild ride.
