Читать книгу The Bitcoin Big Bang - Kelly Brian - Страница 9

My path to Bitcoin Enlightenment careened between cryptographic hash functions and the simple balance sheet that is the beating heart of Bitcoin. Searching for the mysterious creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, made for interesting reading, but it wasn't until I looked at Bitcoin as smart money and a social network that I truly understood the revolution.

Removing the middleman has a long history of disruption in business – the personal computer placed mainframe computing power on the desktop, while the Internet enabled peer-to-peer communication. The collision of personal computers and the Internet spawned companies like Apple, Netflix, Twitter, and Facebook.

The Bitcoin Big Bang is a story of evolution. It is the evolution of currencies, payment systems, how money is used, financial services, and even the way business is organized. It is that moment when you realize the world has changed, permanently and forever. Evolution is a laborious grind, until BANG – everything changes at once.

Even though I knew Bitcoin was game changing, it was still in its infancy. If I became evangelistic about the technology, I risked appearing to be a kook who thought he saw a unicorn. Perhaps it was self-doubt or an innate longing to be part of a crowd, but I would be restless without validation. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, I stumbled on a series of quotes from venture capitalists who were committing big money to Bitcoin. My sanity was restored.

Eventually mainstream products, companies and industries emerge to commercialize it; its effects become profound; and later, many people wonder why its powerful promise wasn't more obvious from the start.

What technology am I talking about? Personal computers in 1975, the Internet in 1993, and – I believe – Bitcoin in 2014.

– Marc Andreessen, inventor of the Web browser and cofounder of Netscape

Marc Andreessen is not only the inventor of the Web browser; he is also a founding partner of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which has invested $50 million in Bitcoin-related companies, including my wallet service, Coinbase.

In 2010, BusinessWeek named Chris Dixon the top angel investor in the technology industry. In 2012, Mr. Dixon joined Andreessen Horowitz, and by 2013, he wrote these words:

Like a lot of people I initially dismissed Bitcoin as a speculative bubble (“Internet tulip bulbs”) or a place to stash money for people worried about inflation (“Internet gold”). At some point, I had an “aha!” moment and realized that Bitcoin was best understood as a new software protocol through which you could rebuild the payments industry in ways that are better and cheaper.

And Peter Thiel, the billionaire founder of another “little” payment system called PayPal, had this to say about Bitcoin:

It is worth thinking about money as the bubble that never ends. There is this sort of potential that bitcoin could become this new phenomenon....

Mr. Thiel has gone on to invest millions in Bitcoin companies like BitPay. If you don't remember Peter Thiel from PayPal, you may remember his business partner, Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla. If that's not enough street cred, you may also recall from the movie The Social Network that Peter Thiel was one of the first outside investors in a promising start-up called The Facebook.

Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Zynga, and Kickstarter are all companies in which Fred Wilson, cofounder of Union Square Ventures, was an early investor. What does he think about Bitcoin?

We believe that bitcoin represents something fundamental and powerful, an open and distributed Internet peer to peer protocol for transferring purchasing power. It reminds us of SMTP, HTTP, RSS and BitTorrent in its architecture and openness.

These venture capitalists have made successful careers out of solving problems. If an idea does not solve a problem, it is unlikely the venture will be profitable. While I knew Bitcoin was important, I could not grasp the problem it was solving. Perhaps it was because I, too, had a problem: my journey toward Bitcoin Enlightenment accidentally made me CNBC's resident expert, but I was struggling to define Bitcoin. I had a sense that something big was happening, but I could not put my finger on it. Maybe it was instincts honed by the sharp edges of financial markets or perhaps it was delusion, but I could feel the change. There is nothing like becoming a television expert to motivate your education. As an early Bitcoin “tourist,” I knew more than most, but eventually that was not enough. The further I climbed the “expert” ladder, the more I found myself grasping for a definition.

Bitcoin is more than a medium of exchange; it is more than an emerging currency – and this technology has the revolutionary power of the personal computer and the Internet. I recoiled each time I read a dismissive article; they did not understand what I had seen … then again, neither did I. During this agonizing process, I stumbled on dozens of uses and a handful of interesting business ideas, but I found a simple definition elusive. Then, over an excruciating 48-hour period, I not only managed to annoy my wife, but also to distill Bitcoin to its four primary elements. Bitcoin was the fertile ground of a new currency; it was breathing new life into our antiquated payment systems; as smart money, it was creating new types of money flows; and it burned with the intensity of a social network.

Mainstream economists have hesitated to define Bitcoin as a currency because its price is too volatile to be considered a store of value and you cannot pay your taxes with bitcoins. There is no doubt the volatility is a huge hurdle; however, the price swings have become less pronounced as the currency has gained acceptance. As for taxes, you cannot pay the U.S. Treasury in Japanese yen or euros, either, but they are considered currencies. At the heart of the tax payment argument is an implicit assumption that the U.S. government is the ultimate enforcer of IOUs or money. In the later chapters, we will dive into Bitcoin's built-in IOU enforcement – no middleman or government needed.