12 Bitcoin and Blockchain Thoughts and Quotes You Need to Read

By
Dinis Guarda

12 Bitcoin and Blockchain Thoughts and Quotes You Need to Read

Bitcoin and its disruptive DNA platform infrastructure Blockchain are still in their inception but are now making the biggest revolution in the finance industry probably in the last hundreds of years! Average leaders and investors are still skeptical but big investors are putting their money on it! Intelligenthq has gathered a collection of powerful quotes from top industry experts, investors, Nobel Prize, CEOs, Economists, technology drivers about the subject. These quotes and reflections help explain the evolution of the Bitcoin and Blockchain phenomenon and its power for innovation.

Just as search engines, browsers and Google disrupted the Internet, and Napster and peer-to-peer file sharing changed the face of the recording industry, bitcoin and its blockchain technology plus its associated ecosystem will eventually force financial organisations to reconsider and change their traditional roles, infrastructure. But, blockchain’s foundations are even more revolutionary as big world leaders, tech influencers, CEOs and Nobel Prices are now realising. A big example is that one of the companies that came out of the Blockchain ecosystem Ethereum passed the1 Billion USD benchmark making it the first somehow independent non-affiliated Unicorn.

The Blockchain industry and its taxonomy are still in discussion but its effective power and reach are now, without a doubt, a force that will be reaching all areas of tech, finance, and society. Even if the debate continues to emerge over the speed of blockchain adoption – major changes will take place probably soon within one to two years, although most of the industry stipulates 5-10 years away. And of course some critics highlight the excess of vibe around the subject.

Taxonomy: Blockchain Tech / DTL vs the Blockchain, Source Coinbase – Creator and producer: Dr Garrick Hileman Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance at the University of Cambridge Research Assistant: Joey Lim London School of Economics – State of Blockchain Q1 2016.

DAO the Decentralized Autonomous Organization built on the Ethereum blockchain – that stores and transmits Ether and Ethereum-based assets – is the fastest growing crowdfunded campaign in history. In fact the DAO crowdfunded campaign reached 10% of all ether (the virtual currency that comes out of Ethereum) in existence in the #DAO with $83,210,000 the sale is live, with final funding could be higher or lower and counting. It is important to highlight though that these funds are being held by design in the cryptocurrency known as Ether, the actual USD amount raised will vary in line with the Ether > USD exchange rate at any given moment.

Most people remain skeptical of the libertarian swarm tech-driven utopia that was created with a cyberpunk related ideology. There are concerns with Bitcoin radical philosophy and its use in platforms such as Silk Road. However Blockchain is much bigger than Bitcoin and its reach is far more holistic and what experts see on it is a global infrastructure that can power our needs for bit data and create new digital identity that can leverage the present issues with cyber security and monopoly by the likes of Google, Facebook, and other that somehow control the destiny of our data and the overall internet.

Renowned economist Paul Krugman, is a skeptic that for example, says: “So do we need a new form of money [Bitcoin]? I guess you could make that case if the money we actually have were misbehaving. But it isn’t. We have huge economic problems, but green pieces of paper are doing fine — and we should let them alone.”  In 2014 Warren Buffett warned other investors to stay away from Bitcoin, calling it “a mirage.” He went so far as saying that, even though there may be a better way of transmitting money, the “idea that it has some huge intrinsic value is just a joke!

But the reality is different and Paul Krugman might be disconnected with the complex world of big data and IOT that is emerging where both government, global organisations, most of the tech companies and banks are coming to terms with the fact that sooner rather than later, blockchain is or will be an  important / critical part of our financial and technological digital future.

Don Tapscott, the influential and authoritative author, a world’s leading authorities on innovation, media, and in the economic and social impact of technology is someone that advises business and government and that wrote among other books such as The Digital Economy, Wikinomics is bold on the subject and reflects about Blockchain that:

The first generation of the digital revolution brought us the Internet of information. The second generation — powered by blockchain technology — is bringing us the Internet of value: a new platform to reshape the world of business and transform the old order of human affairs for the better.

Blockchain is a vast, global distributed ledger or database running on millions of devices and open to anyone, where not just information but anything of value — money, but also titles, deeds, identities, even votes — can be moved, stored and managed securely and privately. Trust is established through mass collaboration and clever code rather than by powerful intermediaries like governments and banks.

His new book, written with his son Alex Tapscott entitled Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business and the World highlights the importance of Blockchain and his defense and passion for the subject definitely demonstrates how fast the process of development of Blockchain is going.

The reality and the impact of Blockchain is seen also by academics and researchers such as Primavera De Filippi, a proactive researcher at CNRS and faculty associate at the Berkman Center, Harvard Law School. Her work and evangelisation on the subject is pushing and defining the boundaries of Blockchain as a driver and a solution to most of the questions regarding the emergent decentralisation of digital and data-driven technologies, and as a critical solution to design new global governance and more technological advanced models, and also bitcoin circuit reviews.

The following 15 quotes reflect the widespread interest on blockchain by very different world leaders and experts on the subject:

1. “I think the fact that within the bitcoin universe an algorithm replaces the functions of [the government] … is actually pretty cool. I am a big fan of Bitcoin”
Al Gore, 45th Vice President of the United States

Al Gore drawing intelligenthq

2.“Bitcoin is a remarkable cryptographic achievement and the ability to create something that is not duplicable in the digital world has enormous value”
Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google

Eric Schmidt Drawing Intelligenthq

3. “You can’t stop things like Bitcoin. It will be everywhere and the world will have to readjust. World governments will have to readjust”
John McAfee, Founder of McAfee.

John McAfee, Founder of McAfee, drawing intelligenthq

4. “I’m reasonably confident … that the blockchain will change a great deal of financial practice and exchange,” he said Tuesday from the Consensus 2016 event in midtown Manhattan, adding that his bet on the future of finance would see “40 years from now, blockchain and all that followed from it will figure more prominently in that story than will bitcoin.”
Larry Summers, US Former Treasury Secretary

Larry Summers, US Former Treasury Secretary

5. “Every informed person needs to know about Bitcoin because it might be one of the world’s most important developments.” Leon Luow, Nobel Peace prize nominee

Leon Luow, Nobel Prize Nominee

6. “Bitcoin gives us, for the first time, a way for one Internet user to transfer a unique piece of digital property to another Internet user, such that the transfer is guaranteed to be safe and secure, everyone knows that the transfer has taken place, and nobody can challenge the legitimacy of the transfer. The consequences of this breakthrough are hard to overstate.”
Marc Andreesen, inventor of the first browser, thought leader and top VC.

Marc Andreessen, VC author and thought leader

7. “Bitcoin is just one example of something that uses a blockchain. Cryptocurrencies are just one example of decentralized technologies. And now that the Internet is big enough and diverse enough, I think we will see different flavors of decentralized technologies and blockchains. I think decentralized networks will be the next huge wave in technology. The blockchain allows our smart devices to speak to each other better and faster.”
Melanie Swan, author of Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy by Swan, Melanie (2015) Paperback

Melanie Swan, author of Blockchain Blueprint for a New Economy

8. “Bitcoin is the beginning of something great: a currency without a government, something necessary and imperative. But I am not familiar with the specific product to assert whether it is the best potential setup. And we need a long time to establish confidence.”
Nassim Taleb, author, thought leader and former trader.

Nassim Taleb, author, thought leader and former trader.

9. “I do think Bitcoin is the first [encrypted money] that has the potential to do something like change the world.”
Peter Thiel, Co-Founder of Paypal.

Peter Thiel, VC, Investor, Thought leader and Author

10. “blockchain is more than just ICT innovation, but facilitates new types of economic organization and governance. Suggests two approaches to economics of blockchain: innovation-centred and governance-centred. Argues that the governance approach—based in new institutional economics and public choice economics—is most promising, because it models blockchain as a new technology for creating spontaneous organizations, ie new types of economies.”
Primavera De Filippi, Economics of blockchain with Sinclair Davidson, Jason Potts

Primavera De Fillippi, Academic, researcher, author and thought leader

11. “Virgin Galactic is a bold entrepreneurial technology. It’s driving a revolution and Bitcoin is doing just the same when it comes to inventing a new currency.”
Sir Richard Branson, Founder of Virgin Records, Virgin Galactic, and 400+ businesses

Richard Branson, Entrepreneur and Thought leader

12. “We have elected to put our money and faith in a mathematical framework that is free of politics and human error.”
Tyler Winklevoss, Co-creator of Facebook, top investor in Bitcoin.

Tyler Winklevoss, Co Creator Facebook, athlete and top investor in Bitcoin

Reading List about Blockchain

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business and the World

Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy

The Business Blockchain: Promise, Practice, and Application of the Next Internet Technology

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