Lawrence Lessig Quotes

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.

The bigger thing with bitcoin is not bitcoin itself, but what does that decentralized technology really do?

With BitTorrent, the cat's out of the bag.

For the first time in 6,000 years of human history, we can have peer-to-peer exchange where trust is not a problem anymore. And it's through the technology that underlies bitcoin. It's called the block chain.

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.

Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer, decentralized form of money, as durable as the Internet itself. Remember, the Internet - or DARPA, as it was originally called - was created as a fail-safe, global network with no 'single point of failure.' If one part goes down, data takes another route, and nothing is lost.

The Ethereum client is literally a fork of Chromium's webkit backend. The idea is that users can build their own interfaces with HTML/JavaScript just like websites, and they will be viewable with the browser much like websites are viewable with the web browser.

When I came up with Ethereum, my first first thought was, 'Okay, this thing is too good to be true.' As it turned out, the core Ethereum idea was good - fundamentally, completely sound.

Ethereum has taken what was a four-function calculator of a programming language in Bitcoin and turned it into a full-fledged computer.

The virtues of the blockchain is that it would be that it's peer-to-peer settlement - no centralized settlement, no manipulation... And most importantly, there's nothing to capture. It's consensus based. It's stateless.

Bitcoin is a currency, bitcoin is a network, bitcoin is a technology and you can't separate these things. A consensus network that bases its value on the currency does not work without the currency.

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.

The narrative behind bitcoin has been dominated by bad behavior. The reality is bitcoin is filled with tons of talented developers building infrastructure.

Distributed ledger technology is fashionable. In fact, if you could wear it, you'd put Ralph Lauren out of business, at least in my case.

A distributed ledger is basically a shared database that allows institutions to directly send and receive money in a trustworthy fashion without a middleman. As a result, we have the capacity to connect the world's payment systems for the first time.That's a big deal.

With NXT there are always going to be a few people who are still developing because that's what NXT is, but that's really exciting because you get to see them thrown into the deep end.

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.

The technical side of Ethereum's efficacy is 100% an engineering exercise.

I think the best projects understand that they don't need to invent a new currency. They don't need to use the block chain as their long-term data storage solution. And they don't need to use the peer-to-peer network as their communication mechanism. They should use the block chain as the world's most secure distributed ledger.

Sales conducted on-chain through smart contracts couldn't really be done before Ethereum, which is why they are a newer concept. I think this style will become the most common over time.

The Ripple network is a protocol. It's like HTTP for money. Users, merchants, anyone can use it for free without a license.

Bitcoin has a core technological innovation: The ability to publicly verify ownership, instantly transfer that ownership, and do so without the need for a trusted third party.

Countless banks around the world are already testing distributed ledger systems in proof-of-concept trials.

In effect, the Internet is a global connection of interconnected computers. It has been described as truly a peer-to-peer system with many distributed nodes and no central point of control architecture.

Blockchains will drop search costs, causing a kind of decomposition that allows you to have markets of entities that are horizontally segregated and vertically segregated.