Video - The Bitcoin Phenomenon - Documentary

SQ1.tv interviewed many of the leaders in the Bitcoin movement including Gavin Andresen, the former lead developer; Jeremy Liew, a venture capitalist; Erik Voorhees, one of the notable libertarians in the movement; Fred Ehrsam, co-founder of Coinbase; Peter Vessenes, head of the Bitcoin Foundation.

TRANSCRIPT

When I first heard about Bitcoin, it seemed just like this very stupid magic internet money.  I didn't really think it was very impressive at all.  And I kept reading and within a couple of hours I became absolutely hooked.

I was skeptical at first and I didn’t think it could possibly work but I have the skills to actually go in and look at it and convince myself that technically it was correct that it could actually work.

It was just an experiment to begin with but I could see the potential with it.

It's a fundamental innovation that's how I think of it.

Bitcoin is the most important invention at least since the internet.

Ask yourself which is more important in your life money or email?  And I think most people will say money so this is bigger than email.

It's just incredibly novel and interesting solution to problems.

The short version of what is Bitcoin is Bitcoin is cash for the internet.  So, it's a new kind of money and it's also a payment network that runs over the internet.  There is a piece of digital information that you can hold that has value and as long as nobody else knows that information that value belongs to you.

This sort of technology was developed independently a few times, I think the NSA developed in the 70s and then academic cryptographers started putting this out later in the 90s.  And it's called public key cryptography.  Now, we now rely on that technology every time your phone talks to your bank or even over maybe SMS sometimes.  I mean it's just embedded in the internet and how we talked.

Bitcoin was invented by Satoshi Nakamoto.  As far as I know, no one has actually met Satoshi.  No one knows who he or she or they are.  I've never talked with Satoshi, above all, I have communicated with him electronically by email or on online forums.  Satoshi started working on Bitcoin, he says in 2007 and it actually took him a couple of years to convince himself that he could actually create a system that would work.  It would solve this problem of how do you create a money where there is no single person or organization or government in charge.  He started posting to a cryptography mailing list where he described kind of in a high level, how it would work and started to get feedback from people on his idea.  I believe it is in the beginning of 2009, he released an academic paper that described the system in detail.  And he also started up Bitcoin he actually released the code for the system and started it running.

Coming from a crypto background I mean well the first thing I did was I read the paper.  When you read the paper and you have that background you think this is very good.  You know they're kind of 50 things that might be wrong with a proposal like this.  And I thought this answers all those questions I mean I thought this is some very high quality work.

So the key problem that Satoshi solved that made the whole system work was a solution to what's called the double spending problem.  So, if I have this digital asset that I want to give to somebody else how do you prevent me from giving it to two different people at the same time because obviously if it's digital, it's easy to copy.  And Satoshi came up with a brilliant system for, if you try to do that, if you try to double spend and give the same Bitcoins to two different people at the same time everybody notices and then one or the other of those transactions is considered valid and the other ones just ignored.  So, solving the double spent problem was the key technical breakthrough that made Bitcoin possible even.

Bitcoin answers another question in a magical way which is, you know, could a bunch of people who don't trust each other all agree on when something happened so precisely that you could use it to transfer value.  And that sounds like you know who've never met each other and we'll never meet just by passing messages.  And, you know, I mean the immediate answer that is like no way, no way you need someone who's trusted in the middle to tell people what happened, you need, you know, you need all these other things.  So, I do think it's incredibly genius.

He's obviously had some academic training because he wrote this academic white paper that you know is in the style of a peer-reviewed academic journal article and he's obviously a genius.  I mean not only was he able to come up with the idea but he was able to actually implement it, actually write code that made it work and who is a genius in a lot of different levels which I think is really rare and fascinating and I'd love to meet him someday.

Satoshi sort of, I think, exists now in the Bitcoin subconscious almost, things are named after him.  It'll be a little bit like finding out who Santa Claus really is if Satoshi is ever revealed like I think it'll be a blow to the collective psyche of Bitcoin.  One interesting thing there are some emails have come out recently that indicate one of, you know, 90s era cryptographer was working on some of this stuff that pretty clearly turned into Bitcoin.  That's a small community so there's probably narrowed down to 30 to 50 people that could have been working on it.

I don't know who's had the last interaction with Satoshi.  It might have possibly been me my very last email to Satoshi, I actually told him that I had been invited to give a talk at the CIA.  So, he had already told me that he was going to step back, I don't know if me telling him that I was just kind of visit the CIA was the reason I've never heard from him again, but I certainly think it didn't help.  Satoshi brilliantly designed the incentives so you don't need to pay anybody to, you know, make sure that all transactions are valid because they get paid by the system itself.  The reward for doing the work of processing transactions and making sure that there are no double spends is tied into the creation of new Bitcoin.  So, the people who are being awarded new Bitcoins are the same people who are making sure that double spends don't happen.  So that's the way new Bitcoin come into existence is you have these people who are validating the Bitcoin transactions who are called Bitcoin miners.  For the work of validating transactions and making sure that nobody cheats there are awarded new Bitcoin, but then you need a way to limit the money supply because I mean validating and transactions is pretty quick.  So there's actually a process called proof of work where the miners have to run this algorithm that takes a lot of CPU time.  You can think of it like pulling lottery tickets.  So, all of the miners on the network are all you know they all validate the transactions and then they're all kind of participating in this lottery to see who will be awarded Bitcoins.  And on average every ten minutes somebody, somewhere on the network is awarded new Bitcoins.

There are fundamental promises made by the Bitcoin network about supply and the supply function's too complex to say out in words but what you could think of is like every four years about half the remaining Bitcoins are given out.  So, for the first four years every ten minutes 50 were given out, next four years 25 and the next and so on.  So eventually that kind of trails off and in the year 2140 no more will be issued.

And that's how we know there will only ever be 21 million Bitcoins created because if you do the math you know that series works out to 21 million.  1 100 millionth of a Bitcoin is the smallest Bitcoin unit which the Bitcoin community has dubbed the Satoshi in honor of the Creator.

I got into it sort of the same way that a lot of the smart tech guys I know do where they hear about it and it reminds them of something like a science fiction novel that they read as a kid.  That's cool but it can't exist and then you go and you read the white paper like that makes sense and then you look at the source code and try to find how you can break it and you can't.  And then you're like this is a real thing now.  And so, I've been following it I sort of as a hobbyist was mining just on my computer when I wasn't using it for anything else.

I'm not a Bitcoin miner.  I actually have in the past traded a few Bitcoins, I ran the Bitcoin software on my laptop computer way back in, you know, May of 2010, when not too many people knew about Bitcoin and it was actually possible to create Bitcoins on an ordinary laptop computer.  But when I did the math, I found out that you know I was paying more in electricity to create the Bitcoins than the Bitcoins were worth and so it made more sense if I wanted to have some bitcoins to just buy them from somebody else maybe somebody who living in place that had less expensive electricity than me.

Okay, so there is a lot of altruism in the system.  Very, very first miners want to help, great they think it's cool.  I just think it's cool whatever you do a lot of things because you think they're cool.  As soon as there is an exchange rate, miners are saying like as I did in 2010, I have a lot of computer sitting around.  They're already sucking power.  I am happy to turn that into money like who knows what I'll do with it, I'm just I can see I'm making money doing this.  That sort of spread mining.

In 2010, you could mine with your home computer and make a decent amount of Bitcoin which today would be worth a lot, at the time they weren't.

So, from the early days there have been miners who use their computers to make money and love it and then there have been speculators or people want to buy who are like that is for wankers like I'm just going to go lay my cash on the table and buy these and I'll see what we'll do with them later I like this plan.  At the time, there are 7200 Bitcoins issued a day.  And you know that was probably $350 worth when the first exchange launches ¢ 5 or so is the first rates.  So yeah, you know, you've got $50,000 to play with as an investor, like you're going to go mine for two years.  You're going to go mine for two years.  The money guys want to know, they always want to trade and the nerds always want to mine.  It's very rare in the space that people want to do both.  They're just they're often on one side or the other.

Bitcoin puzzles a lot of economists who would not have predicted that you'd be able to start from something that has no intrinsic value and there is zero value in the Bits of data on your disk and yet has managed to bootstrap itself into arguably the world's most valuable currency.  And how that happened I think is a really interesting study in economics you might need to make some economists rethink their ideas about money.  It took some early adopters with enough faith to actually spend real money to purchase some Bitcoins to start to give it a value.

The earliest adopters at least that I knew of who wanted Bitcoin who wanted something that was not that was completely democratizes, can we decentralize they wanted something that was anonymous, they wanted something that was completely outside spending in the welfare state.

The early adopters of Bitcoin were really attracted to it as a very hard money I mean Bitcoin has a fixed money supply which appeals to a lot of people who believe that central bank's creating money whenever they feel like it is a really bad idea.  So, I think you saw a lot of early adopters that were really attracted to Bitcoin for economic reasons.

If you're non-technical and you're interested in Bitcoin you don't like Ben Bernanke you are worried about inflation, hyperinflation.  You find a fiat currency of all sorts suspect you know these are the folks that are non-technical that come first.

So there are really three factors that drive interest in Bitcoin.  The first is its decentralized nature.  The second is its anonymity or really pseudonymity and the third thing is its zero transaction costs.  And what's interesting is that different people have been attracted to Bitcoin at different points in time by different elements of those three characteristics.  So, the first early adopters of Bitcoin were attracted to its decentralized nature and so there was a lot of people who had a political motivation behind it.  They might have been libertarians they didn't like the idea of a central governing body of their currency.  And that was you know that kind of passion that was driven by you know some of these ideological grounds is what's necessary to get something from nothing to that first step.  Just to get a few people involved and have some value created.

First of all, people don't think about where the dollar comes from, what spending that dollar means.  And they don't think about taxation.  So, any of those things tend to be outside people's normal, why would you think about that but you're buying the bag of potato chips there's no reason to.  But if you're philosophically aware of these things how we're going to create empire and how the U.S. is able to occupy somehow can't afford financial to occupy so many countries.  Then you start thinking how am I participating in this system and that's by spending the Federal Reserve Note.  So, for a lot of people it's about -- for them it's about living their values they want to use a peace dollar and for them the Bitcoin is working.

Then you had a second set of people who are interested in the anonymity.  And in large part because they might have been doing something online that they didn't want to be associated with.  They might some sort of illegal activity they might have been selling guns, they might have been selling drugs, they might just be an online gambling.

It's absolutely absurd for any government to tell someone what they can do with their own money if they're not harming anyone.  The fact that the United States claims to be a free country that respects the rights of individuals and yet a full-grown adult cannot wager his own money on his own game that he chooses is a terrible hypocrisy.  Not to mention the fact that the state runs various lotteries which have far worse odds than most casinos and market themselves in fact to the very poorest and least able to understand the problems of gambling.  So, while the state does this institutionally they also throw private people in prison for running games with better odds, better customer service and you know it's one of many problems that we have with the government in the U.S. and in other countries.

You know, Bitcoin has been widely used by a website called Silk Road which allows pretty much everything to be bought and sold.  Some of the products on there are made illegal by various governments yet its rates on there.  You know I don't do drugs I don't even drink caffeine or alcohol so it's just nothing that personally I'm interested in but what I am interested in is looking at the ability of the market to solve these problems because these particular market actors they were excluded from traditional banking systems and Silk Road and Bitcoin have provided a solution to that but we see other market actors which have also been excluded for different reasons, for example Wikileaks, they're engaged in political speech and the banks and MasterCard they've terminated service.  We have the IRS targeting political opponents for political speech.  And people wonder why they might want to have anonymity?  It's very difficult to exercise your speech if you don't have the ability to transact.  And so, what we're seeing with Bitcoin is money has literally become speech.

There are lots of people interested in Bitcoin for different reasons and they have lots of different opinions on different things and they argue with each other all the time.  And yes, some people believe that things like Silk Road are terrible for Bitcoin.  Other people think that it's that's the killer app and that's why it has all of its value in the first place.  Bitcoin needs to be understood as a tool and a useful tool is used by everyone who finds it useful so just that just as bad people use the cell phone in the car, bad people are going to use Bitcoin and people shouldn't fear that or worry about that.

Now, the trouble with both of those groups of people is that they just not that large.  There aren't that many people who are passionate enough about their politics so they will adopt new currency.  And there aren't that many people breaking the law, you know, in wholesale ways, but it's this transition to the third characteristic that's really interesting because zero transaction cost has an appeal to everybody, everybody would like to save money on transaction costs.  It just takes costs out of the system and because of that it has much, much broader appeal.  But what's interesting is that and that's why I'm interested right, that's why I'm interested in.  I think that you know you've got an opportunity to revolutionize financial services tens of billions, hundreds of billions of markets cap at risk if that comes under pressure then it's like squeezing a balloon market value has to be created somewhere else ideally in these new companies.

Coinbase generally speaking our goal is to make it easy for the average consumer and the average merchant to use Bitcoin.  I think sort of the litmus test for all this is can I feasibly present this to someone who hasn't seen before even my mom and can she reasonably use it?  That's sort of what we're trying to build towards.

So whenever you get a new technology there is always these predictable waves of companies.  And the first wave is building the infrastructure that just makes the damn thing work.  And right now, just to make Bitcoin work at all you need exchanges to get money into Bitcoin, you need wallets to hold the Bitcoin and you need payment processes to be able to spend the Bitcoin.  So that's infrastructure level that's where we are today.

You think about the average business that's accepting PayPal or Credit Card in the internet.  They're paying roughly 2.7% to do that and just even chopping that down to what a company like Coinbase offers at the moment 1% costs is a significant cost saving let's say you're a 5% margin business all of a sudden, if you're saving 2% on credit card processing costs that is 40% to your bottom line which is very non-negligible.  Add another things like case like micro transactions where maybe there is a prohibitive ¢20 base fee on a credit card.  All of a sudden, you can now have a business model worth's pay ¢5 to read the rest of this article.

So the biggest opportunity that I see right now is micro transactions.  So, if I want to pay somebody ¢5 online today, it's not possible.  Because in a card not present transaction if I'm trying to use my credit card which I'm inevitably doing online there is no other way pay cash can't jam in into the computer.  There is a minimum of the ¢30 charge plus 2% of the transaction.  So, if I'm trying to charge you ¢5 and it's going to cost me ¢30 to do it, I can't do it.  So, if you remember the earthquake in Haiti a little while ago.  Red Cross had this great campaign, you could text to send a dollar that was a one-off thing you haven't seen that again.  And the reason was because in that one instance everybody waved their fees but in general you have the same problem.  If you want to send somebody a dollar, donate a dollar to a charity, 30 something cents of that is going to go just to the payment processing which means only 70% of your donation actually goes to the charity that you intended to give it to.  That's not a very good way to do things with Bitcoin because the transaction costs go to zero because there are no minimums, you can have people giving a$1, $2, ¢25 and all of that money will go to the charity.  So, there are lots of these use cases that can become these vertical applications that sit on top of the infrastructure and that's how new technologies emerge in financial services.

In the Bitcoin community, there is a bit of a tension between people who pine for the good old days of Bitcoin kind of being the bad boy of currency to people who think that we need to grow up and engage with regulators and banks and the traditional finance system more.

Bitcoin definitely needs to shy away and move away from a lot of the original use cases that I think the media likes to tout i.e. drugs or whatever else it may be.  And for it to really flourish the average sort of business needs to realize the great payment efficiencies that Bitcoin can bring and ultimately when a day of reckoning comes in Washington where somebody has done something bad with Bitcoin.  I think it's going to be our job as a community to sort of pull on this pool of goodwill that's been built in all these businesses who are now saving say 2% on their bottom line maybe in a much larger percentage as some percentage of their net profit and say hey, we need Bitcoin to survive.  This is actually creating a real economic good.

So, I think for Bitcoin to become really big and for venture capitalists to start to invest you know we have to believe that companies are going to embrace the regulation and accept it and comply with it.  That's going to mean that anonymity is going to have to go at least for transactions over certain size.  That is likely to be some level of centralization or at least these trusts counterparties emerging.

So, I know we have a very strong libertarian base in the Bitcoin community right now.  And they're very ideologically different but as VC has come in and invest and bigger companies grow up you're going to see that fade.  I think it's good.  Because you know it's not accessible world view for most people.  It's really not the most transformative part.  The most transform a part of Bitcoin is the Economic Liberty it gives to people around the world.

VCs are not the only source of capital, especially in the Bitcoin market.  You have a, lots of people with lots of money who have very well-aligned objectives with Bitcoin.  And they can fund whatever they wish.

I would say that in order for Bitcoin to go mainstream regulation is necessary because in order for the average consumer to feasibly feel like they can use it.  They want to feel safe in some way.  And part of that is understanding Bitcoin, part of it is around federal entities not necessarily the Bitcoin needs a federal entity to become legitimate but it certainly provides that sort of additional stamp of approval that would get people more comfortable with it.

In America, you got to live by American regulation or whatever jurisdiction you have to live in.  And so what we're seeing is a set of entrepreneurs who are just saying well look at those are the ground rules then we will comply with them because the opportunity that we create by compliance is sufficiently big that the costs of compliance are worth it.  And we're not actually giving up that much because, you know what, if you guys are over at FinCEN want to stop money laundering, you know what, I'm not going to make money out of money laundering.  That's not my objective.  I want to make money I have a whole set of legitimate use cases which are far, far bigger.  And so, in each case if you can understand the objective, the regulator and you can then comply.  There may be some additional costs involved, there may be some additional time involved but it allows you to go after a much, much bigger market.

Anything that has to do with money the United States government is going to try to regulate it.  There is, I mean you can't ask a lion not to tear up its prey.  I mean that's what the United States government does to the consumer to the citizen of the human being is, you know, literally steal and tear from it.  So, it's inevitable that, you know, they're going to try to regulate a Bitcoin.

I think it is false to believe that the winners in the Bitcoin economy are going to be based in America.  And the reason is that America has one of the most oppressive financial regulatory schemes of much of the world.  And so, trying to run a financial company when other people can move their businesses to more hospitable jurisdictions and because Bitcoin works all over the world.  So, a company can set up anywhere and service its customers in any other part of the world.  A company would be hamstringing itself to set up in the U.S.  Now indeed a lot of them do and are because it's easier to raise venture capital in the beginning stages.  But those companies are going to run into heavy problems when the government starts to realize that Bitcoin is actually an existential threat to its own money, it's not going to put up with people in its own borders, you know, perpetuating that.

I tend to be on the side of the people who think that we need to engage, you know, with banks and regulators and you know traditional systems maybe I'm a little more conservative.  I think there is a lot we can learn from, you know, kind of traditional money system.  I think there is a lot they can learn from us also but you know there is hundreds of years of experience of you know banks keeping people's money safe.  And I think that's really important for Bitcoin.

Consumers be able to go to a business and say like yep, okay it's like accredited by a Bitcoin foundation, like it matches certain like standards for our industry.  And yes, their licenses are in order and therefore I don't worry about Homeland Security seizing all the funds in these accounts like I'm happy, so you know, consumers were like that.  Most consumers not all time crypto anarchists they will hate that and they'll do their own thing and that is totally fine.  But the vast bulk of people use these businesses will benefit from that.

The community that has brought Bitcoin from nothing to where it is today has a different set of ideals than the people who are starting to come in a Bitcoin now and saying well to take it to the mainstream this is what's going to be needed.  And so, you're seeing some clash of ideas and some clash of ideals.

People with money tend to want to protect their money and the biggest danger to many people's money is that the government will seize it.  Why would the government seize it?  It believes that you've done something against its wishes.  So, it's no surprise that you know venture capital companies and wealthy people tend to at least on the surface be very Pro regulation because they do not want to engender harm by becoming a target of the government.

I'm Pro regulation.  I think it's an opportunity.  So I have investors who invest only in pre regulated financial companies and they've built them themselves.  And you know part of the Playbook is get regulated in a good way.  In a way that's good for everyone that's good for the space.  So yeah, like should wallet providers be able to act functionally as banks without any oversight or regulation?  No, they should not.  Now, you know, fundamental to Bitcoin is like if you want to choose to do that fine.  No one really no one will be able to stop you at a small scale and if individuals want to choose to put their money with whomever they want, that's great, I don't mind that.  But we can't have like large scale poor, business practices that could impact the whole community, I'm not into that and I think regulations part of that story.

People are, they're saying this is our real future.  So that instinct that they have to want to do something that ridiculous is regulate the currency, suggest that their people know this is here to stay and there is big money.  But as in people there have been a lot of debate about this among anarchist and I see this a group debate goes back and forth yesterday on twitter.  One of the points of Bitcoin is that it's not regulated, it's not centralized and it's completely anonymous, people don't have to know what you're doing in your most intimate areas of your life if you can use Bitcoin.  The regulation that a lot of these people are welcoming of course are going to dampen, it's going to dampen a lot of the enthusiasm of Bitcoin and can potentially hurt it.

Coming from this with personal sentiments as a crypto anarchist, you know, Bitcoin's just amazingly awesome because it massively changes the rules of the game.  Anyone can send any amount of money to anyone anywhere at any time can't be seized or confiscated or frozen in any way, but I also realized that no great amount of wealth is going to be created except with the permission of the government.  And along that role, as an investor venture capitalist type, I have a fiduciary duty.  And so, as a result I want to know the rules that my investments and the founders of those companies need to play by.  Because now, I know that my founder can act in a certain way and he's not going to end up in jail and the investments not going to get seized in the company and that's not going to hurt my investment.  So, it is kind of paradoxical in a way but I think overall it's going to help legitimize Bitcoin and bring it into much more mainstream transactions.

Companies that are involved in Bitcoin can be regulated but the underlying core system, the technology is, it is beyond the reach of any regulatory scheme just by nature of it being based on cryptography and mathematics and peer-to-peer networks.  So, you know, there is nothing much that the government can do except to try not to cause more damage and we'll see how this plays out and it's going to be very interesting.

It doesn't matter whether the government wants to regulate it or not.  Ultimately, there'll be another form of Bitcoin or something else the next day.  It makes no difference.  This is something they can't control.  And it's the future, why fight it?

There are a lot of different ways Bitcoin can succeed.  And my job as the core developer is to kind of concentrate on the core code and make sure the Bitcoin network keeps reliably processing transactions.  And then to kind of be agnostic about how Bitcoin succeeds.

In 10 years Bitcoin is likely to be gone simply because most things that are new tend to fail.  So, everyone who gets into this needs to understand that it could just disappear tomorrow and going.  But with that realization if it has not fallen apart and it actually continues to work and continues to grow it will have taken over much of the world's financial system.  It will have changed everything about the way people move money, how they hold money, how they perceive value, what their relationships are with their government and with merchants and with each other.  There is going to be amazing new ways that people use money that people can't even imagine now just as when the internet came out people couldn't imagine all the different things that people do.  So, it would be foolish to try to predict exactly what will happen other than to say it will be very, very intense shift.  And when people realized what happened over the course of so small a time they'll look back and realized wow, like that, that should have all been very obvious.

I think it is the protocol for money on the internet.  So, in 20 years when computers trade value with each other for whatever reason they'll use Bitcoin or its successor to do that.  It'll be just like right now I would very rarely do any of our technology trade value.  But in 20 or 30 years it'll happen all the time.  You'll log on and you'll be able to pay a little more for faster internet.  You know there is just a hundred ways that computers will be transmitting value to each other all the time.  So that and they'll use Bitcoin for that.

If it does take off, I suspect that it will become invisible to the consumers.  And in the same way that people don't think about payment systems in general, you know, Bitcoin will be invisible and transparent to them.  And so, they'll just know that they can pay to you know pay a penny to read an article on their tablet.  And they won't even be thinking about is Bitcoin because Bitcoin will be invisible to them in the background.  It's going to be an infrastructure system.

I think we're going to go through a phase where there is more centralization because there is kind of a natural monopoly that will happen with exchanges.  But then I believe that eventually we're going to grow out of that and the Bitcoin economy will sustain itself.  And there, there is really very little friction because it's really designed to be this decentralized, peer-to-peer currency and I have no special ability to predict the future.  So, I might be wrong.

Well, Bitcoin as a potential to be a subversive currency and I do applaud that.  It also can be strictly bush wash you know Ma and Pa next door can use Bitcoin.  They use dollars now it's not like all throughout human history of them using paper currency all sorts of things have been used as currency throughout time.  It's not as if the dollar was handed down you know Moses came down and said here we must use this dollar.  We just to have to open up the doors of the way people think about money.

I do think that this new era of math based currencies will find whatever the problem was with Bitcoin and we'll patch it perhaps in a light coin or Bitcoin 2.0.  We'll find a way to continue to serve the market needs and what the market demands.

I think Bitcoin will grow to something where maybe 5% of people's wealth will be held in Bitcoin.  And hopefully, it represents the working capital that a lot of businesses use to enter and not have to leave this frictionless payment world doesn't mean 100% of your assets have to be in it.  But whatever sort of lubricates the transactions that you're doing on a daily basis is a business.

Bitcoin might succeed someplace else in the world maybe a you know country like Zimbabwe that recently saw hyperinflation.  Maybe they'll decide instead of using the U.S. dollars our currency which they're doing now.  Maybe a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin would make sense as their national currency.  You know, that's a possibility.  I don't know what's going to happen.  My job is to concentrate on making it possible so any of those great things can happen.  And I think it's going to be really interesting in the next 5 years to see what does happen.

Hopefully, they'll appreciate the risks that we're taking to make it happen in the early days because most people just laugh at it right now.

Yeah, we're like that, we are double-a leagues yeah.

I call myself an anarchist.  I'm forced to put a label on it.  I just don't find it's entirely helpful in communicating some of these ideas to normal people.

Yeah, I think America reached its peak probably in 2000 and it's been in decline since then.

The guy used his credit card to order pizza to be delivered to the first guy.  So, this is the first publicly known transaction where some actual good other than money was involved.

We believe my company and I that Bitcoins offers a final solution for the medical marijuana conundrum.

We're having a Bitcoin party, champagnes flowing, people are celebrating, we're all thinking we're going to be Bitcoin millionaires soon.

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