I believe that Bitcoin holds value as a form of 'good money' that is superior to any previously discovered or developed form of money.
Jeremy Allaire
The blockchain is to money what SMTP is to email. It's an open way to move value around. Every existing player in this space - not just Venmo but also Google and Facebook and others - are all closed; they all want to work just within their own walled garden.
We really think of Bitcoin as a global, interoperable payment network instead of a store of value.
The same way we can send and receive an email with anyone, anywhere, for free, or we can share a photo with anyone instantly for free, money will become these digital tokens, and we'll be able to do that with money.
The Internet requires evolved forms of governance that we haven't figured out as a planet. I'd love to help make that easier and make that possible.
The big idea of, 'Hey, I can pay anyone, anywhere, with whatever digital wallet they have, and it just flows around the Internet' - that's on the horizon; that's how we built everything we do.
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.
Everyone, it's okay to say the word 'bitcoin' and acknowledge that it is the actual platform that is driving this innovation that we're all building on. It's also okay to say 'the bitcoin blockchain,' or 'the blockchain,' if you're afraid that people will think you're weird.
We use the block chain to share value, just like Internet protocol lets us share communication. Our goal is to build a global, international bank that is instant, global, and free. Sending payments should be as easy as sending an email.
New mobile-payment-based models are, in some ways, more secure. Because in a model like Circle's, for example, we never transmit your personal information or your financial credentials to the people you're paying.
Digital currency attempts to disrupt the financial industry, and it's potentially threatening to the existing financial services industry, but it doesn't have to be that way.
There's all these proofs that go on of identity, of records, and they're quite non-digital. The blockchain innovation really allows us to take everything where there's record keeping, everything where there's trust around record keeping, and it allows us to make that digital, immutable, permanent, and global.
Bitcoin may herald the dawning of a new age in currency. It holds superior traits as a form of 'good money.' As a tangible form of asset (its core tangibility being its mathematical basis), it could become an incredibly important building block for the 21st century's global economy.
If you look at the trends, China very well could be the driver of the adoption of block chain consumer services.
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.
I think there's a need for services that will make it easier for Chinese consumers to spend globally. The Bitcoin network could be an attractive solution.
This is the thing that I think we're all learning from the Chinese: that this merging of messaging, media, and payments together really makes sense to people.
We're barely scratching the surface of how people experience and utilize p2p payments, despite it being a multi-millennium-old behavior.
The emergence of open Internet protocols for value exchange, today led by the global adoption of Bitcoin's blockchain, paves the way for value to move as freely as information and data move on the Internet today.
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.
The idea of cross-border payments is going to completely go away... Our vision is for there to be no distinction between international and domestic payments.
We don't think there is any money to be made in payments anymore. The entire business model of extracting a toll or having time delays around the movement of value is going away completely.
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.
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.
Bitcoin can be programmed, metered, and exchanged by connected devices, enabling more efficient usage of our planet's resources and services.
Social messaging has become the defining app of the smartphone era. Social payments has been a natural extension of this phenomenon - it's going to be the locus of most communications activity.
The focus around Circle China is really cross-border payments. If I'm a parent in China and my son is studying at London Business School, I might want to send 500 RMB. I should be able to do that and have my child instantly receive it as pounds sterling, in the same way people do that with instant messages today.
We'd love to see a world where Venmo added support on the blockchain, then a Circle customer could pay a Venmo customer using their QR code or their blockchain address - and go between those instantly and for free.
