This strategy is not only true with bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, but with all kinds of investments and asset classes. I’ve been using the Internet for years to pay people online, to carry out all kinds of transactions. So you know, we have poor people from developing countries go abroad, and then they remit their money back home to their home country to feed their children or their parents and their families. Over the past few decades, consumers have become more curious about their energy consumption and personal effects on climate change. DUBNER: Now, Marc, I think one part of the Bitcoin story that’s confusing for people is that most of the coverage, at least in the past five or six months, has been about the volatility of the currency itself, of Bitcoin as a currency, right? And so if you have a payment system like Bitcoin where you don’t have the credential exchange, and you have no risk of identity fraud and you have no risk of people being able to run transactions on your credit card after the fact, you can basically eliminate that entire category of fraud. ANDREESSEN: Some of that business will be transactions, some of that business will be digital contracts, some of that business will be digital keys, digital signatures and then the system will start to work itself into things like antifraud, or things like public payments, or things like micropayments.
ANDREESSEN: At the core of what Bitcoin is the solution to a fundamental problem in computer science that’s been around for decades that had never been solved before… Now, if you’re not a fan of computer science, this might get a little bit less interesting before it gets more interesting, but hang in there. Well, if you’re in the retail banking or credit-card industry, mostly bad possibilities. And as you’re probably well aware, digital trust is a concept that’s brand new. And so the question is how do you coordinate a significant number of people who don’t know each other and don’t trust each other being able to communicate securely and be able to basically establish digital trust? Binance traders generally will also be affected, both because they won’t be able to deposit or Coin-viewer.com withdraw their digital money and because, as Sirer notes, the uncertainty of who exactly is participating in those markets could lead to some mayhem. Originally, Bitcoin was intended to provide an alternative to fiat money and become a universally accepted medium of exchange directly between two involved parties. What they do is essentially transfer IOUs back and forth to make sure that digital money is not spent twice.
HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol): allows multimedia webpages to be transferred over a network, in the way the original author intended it to look. And I didn’t transfer it to three other people at the same time, I didn’t lie about the fact that I transferred it. You didn’t lie about the fact that you now own it. So you can see why Marc Andreessen is such an evangelist for Bitcoin – aside from the fact that his firm has Bitcoin investments. So why doesn’t WNYC accept Bitcoin? But go by its recent boom – and a forecast by Snapchat’s first investor, Jeremy Liew, that it will hit a bitcoin price of $500,000 by 2030 – and nabbing even a fraction of a bitcoin starts to look a lot more enticing. And so that will be part of the kind of economics that will determine, you know, who chooses to hold Bitcoin versus who chooses to convert it back to regular currency. You know, one of the huge problems of the Internet over 20 years is who do you trust, which websites do you trust, which people do you trust when you do a transaction, who do you trust? Those industries have made fortunes by taking a cut of every transaction, which a virtual, and virtually frictionless currency like Bitcoin, could perform for much, much less.
ANDREESSEN: The metaphor basically is you have a group of generals in the Byzantine Empire and they’ve surrounded a huge city. ANDREESSEN: So the transaction itself in that case is free because Bitcoin transactions today are free, and then in the long run there will be very small transaction fees associated with that kind of thing. ANDREESSEN: Well credit card fraud, we actually know basically what credit card fraud costs the economy which is basically most of the credit card fees. That today is running about 1 percent, but you could imagine those fees coming down fairly quickly. The Block broke down the total value of reserves in dollars and each reserve asset, using data via Defi Llama. Indeed, recall that this block is not carried over anywhere else. Meanwhile, good practice recommends (though does not enforce) that every address be used only once: any amount left over in change from a transaction should not be kept in the old address but moved to a new one. One of the things as a consequence that’s been missing on the Internet for 20 years is kind of a native concept of money, right?
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