Once Wall Street starts putting money into Bitcoin - we're talking about hundreds of millions, billions of dollars moving in - it's going to have a pretty dramatic effect on the price.
Within my social circle, there is a large group of people who will take bitcoin as legal tender; like, you can go to them and settle debts in Bitcoin, and they will happily take it.
In April 2013, Nathaniel Popper of 'The New York Times' reported on Bitcoin in an article titled, 'Digital Money is Gaining Champions in the Real World'.
The Internet's proven to be a pretty big deal for global society, and Bitcoin could basically be thought of as the Internet, applied to money.
Unlike Bitcoin or email, our financial institutions and payment systems today are proprietary. This limits the ability for consumers to easily switch between payment providers and creates less competition for services.
When we look at government in Washington or what's happening on Wall Street, we see so much centralization. But really, our goals should be to eliminate and overcome these central institutions. And in recent years we have gained powerful new tools to do this, and most significant among those is the block chain, which is the software behind Bitcoin.
What's really happening is that every bank in the country is experimenting with the blockchain and experimenting with bitcoin to figure out where the value is. For the first time ever, they're working hand in hand with startups. Banks are asking startups for help to build products.
We can divide bitcoin people into two camps: one that goes along with the existing system and wants it to work complimentarily with the existing system, and then the other half is basically religiously opposed and wants to invent a libertarian, regulation-free world.
You just can't bifurcate bitcoin currency from the technology. Bitcoin will always need a monetary base.
It is one thing to think gold has some marvelous store of value because man has no way of inventing more gold or getting it very easily, so it has the advantage of rarity. Believe me, man is capable of somehow creating more bitcoin... They tell you there are rules and they can't do it. Don't believe them.
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.
Facebook is like the Internet: a large company and an application. Bitcoin is a protocol for decentralisation, so you could build a decentralised company on top of it, a stock market. It's an Internet of ownership, so it's not quite a direct comparison.
When we look at government in Washington or what's happening on Wall Street, we see so much centralization. But really, our goals should be to eliminate and overcome these central institutions. And in recent years we have gained powerful new tools to do this, and most significant among those is the block chain, which is the software behind Bitcoin.