Patrick M. Byrne Quotes

It's important not to think about Bitcoin as a replacement for cash or gold or something that works alongside that; it's to think of it as programmable money. And we just cannot even imagine what that will be used for.

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.

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

Cryptocurrency currencies take the concept of money, and they take it native into computers, where everything is settled with computers and doesn't require external institutions or trusted third parties to validate things.

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.

I love this stuff - bitcoin, ethereum, blockchain technology - and what the future holds.

With the block chain, for the first time, we no longer need these central institutions for settlement or for guaranteeing the value of coins or for land titling. All of these functions can be replaced by a transparent public ledger that is safe from tampering and which can make value and ownership clear and open for everyone.

I call the blockchain 'the Internet of value' and 'the Internet of trust.' Because everything becomes trustless. It's a big distributed ledger. Think of it like an Excel file that's being maintained and updated and managed by millions of computers around the world.

Digital currency is not going away. It's here to stay.

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.

The blockchain concept was pioneered within the context of crypto-currency Bitcoin, but engineers have imagined many other ways for distributed ledger technology to streamline the world. Stock exchanges and big banks, for example, are looking at blockchain-type systems as trading settlement platforms.

The right way to think about the blockchain is that it's going to replace the entire Internet.

Bitcoin as a globally distributed public ledger - that's the thing I'm most excited about going forward. Thinking about how to use Bitcoin in new and innovative ways. In the meantime, we have the boring uses of Bitcoin that are in the process of going mainstream.

Bitcoin is a technological tour de force

People think about Bitcoin incorrectly. They think about it as currency or about gold or hoarding, speculation, about how much money do you make. When really, what it is is an API for programmable cash transactions.

Think of Bitcoin as a bank account in the cloud, and it's completely decentralized: not the Swiss government, not the American government. It's all the participants in the network enforcing.

Bitcoin is a swarm of cyber hornets serving the goddess of wisdom, feeding on the fire of truth, exponentially growing ever smarter, faster, and stronger behind a wall of encrypted energy.

Just as the web democratized publishing and development, Bitcoin can democratize building new financial services. Contracts can be entered into, verified, and enforced completely electronically, using any third-party that you care to trust, or by the code itself.

Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are already trustless - any machine can accept it from any other, securely. They are (nearly) free. They are global - no central bank required, and any machine can speak the language.

Bitcoin offers one service: securely time-stamped, scripted transactions. Everything else is built on the edge-devices as an application. Bitcoin allows any application to be developed independently, without permission, on the edge of the network.

Private funding was one of the first methods used when MIT funded Bitcoin core developers Gavin Andresen, Wladimir van der Laan, and Cory Fields in 2015.

The blockchain is the financial challenge of our time. It is going to change the way that our financial world operates.

By lowering the barrier to create new digital currency applications, we'll see an explosion in the number of ideas tried. We'll invest in, partner with, or build a number of new applications in this space, including replacements for many of the services people use in finance 1.0.

If you're someone in the business of verifying transactions on a proprietary network, the invention of Bitcoin cannot be safely ignored. It will change or disrupt the providers of most proprietary payment networks in the coming years.