Patrick M. Byrne Quotes

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

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.

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.

I do think the blockchain infrastructure is here to stay.

The blockchain is a distributed network that solves all the problems that we have of finance, but more broadly, it's like a philosophy. It's a way of life.

Over the next decade, there will be disruption as significant as the Internet was for publishing, where blockchain is going to disrupt dozens of industries, one being capital markets and Wall Street.

Blockchain is really exciting technology because it's actually providing both transparency but also agility in a contractual relationship that any organization should have.

Make no mistake - Ethereum would never have existed without Bitcoin as a forerunner. That said, I think Ethereum is ahead of Bitcoin in many ways and represents the bleeding edge of digital currency.

Blockchain technologies will change transactions in a broad way.

The interesting thing about blockchain is that it has made it possible for humanity to reach a consensus about a piece of data without having any authority to dictate it.

I think the whole narrative of blockchain without bitcoin will amount to very little.

The blockchain is to money what SMTP is to email. It's an open way to move value around. Every existing player in this space - not just Venmo but also Google and Facebook and others - are all closed; they all want to work just within their own walled garden.

While it may seem scarier in the earlier days, I think ultimately the blockchain creates a safer world.

XRP is a digital asset that exists on the XRP ledger, one of the open-source products created by Ripple. XRP is a pivotal component of the Internet of Value, since it solves a key point of friction: the pre-funding of nostro/vostro accounts necessary to facilitate cross border payments.

And once you get instantaneous communication with everybody, you have economic activity that's far more advanced, far more liquid, far more distributed than ever before.

The changing nature of money is only one facet of the financial services revolution.

Imperceptibly, the developed world's manufacturing base was gradually eroding and being replaced by securitized finance that destroyed itself and nearly its economies in 2008.

You had the Crash [Meltdown] of 2008, where the financial system actually collapsed and had to be put on life support, which consisted of substituting sovereign credit for the financial credit that was no longer credible.

The financial industry may not be synonymous with economics, but it does control a large enough sector of the global economy to sink us all, as was unnervingly demonstrated in 2008.

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.

Whatever happens to bitcoin, other cryptocurrencies are gaining ground and more respect. Ethereum, for instance, has far more transparency.

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.

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

Blockchain's a very interesting technology that will have some very profound applications for society over the years to come.

Pretty uniformly, people want the benefits of bitcoin and the blockchain - near-instant transfers, globally available on any Internet-connected device, highly secure, and nearly-free value transfers.