At Square, we got our tech up and running in three weeks, but it took us 18 months to get licenses, banking relationships and everything else we needed to be able to move money. We had to partner up with major companies to do it.
The main event isn't bitcoin. It's using the blockchain to disrupt other industries and Wall Street.
The thing about innovation in financial markets is they're always building on what has come before. It's a natural process.
As with so many sectors of the economy, technology is transforming the retail banking sector.
There's no question: the finance market is moving into the cloud.
As befits Silicon Valley, 'big data' is mostly big hype, but there is one possibility with genuine potential: that it might one day bring loans - and credit histories - to millions of people who currently lack access to them.
Our view is that consumer finance - what people think of as retail finance - that arena is ripe for disruption. Bitcoin is absolutely a core platform and asset format that we are dependent on to build this business.
I keep wondering at night, 'Will I have a bank the next morning, or will some technology company be doing banking without needing a bank?'
Bitcoin is great as a form of digital money, but its scripting language is too weak for any kind of serious advanced applications to be built on top.
We use the block chain to share value, just like Internet protocol lets us share communication. Our goal is to build a global, international bank that is instant, global, and free. Sending payments should be as easy as sending an email.
Money is being made programmable. That's a fundamental change with implications we can still barely see.
Every business has to re-think their own business model and say does it meet this DSM test and do their products and services meet the test of being digital, social, and mobile? I think the banks are doing the same.
I am in a traditional financial services business - but we at Fidelity can see that the evolution of technology is setting our industry up for disruption. What if this technology could do for the transfer of value what the Internet did for the transfer of information?
