READING: Marc Andreessen (2014): Why Bitcoin Matters (excerpts)

Do note þt Andreessen never says "blockchain" and always says "BitCoin"...

<https://archive.nytimes.com/dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/01/21/why-bitcoin-matters/>

A mysterious new technology emerges, seemingly out of nowhere, but actually the result of two decades of intense research and development by nearly anonymous researchers. Political idealists project visions of liberation and revolution... establishment elites heap contempt and scorn on it... technologists... are transfixed... see within it enormous potential and spend their nights and weekends tinkering.... Eventually mainstream products, companies and industries emerge to commercialize it; its effects become profound; and later, many people wonder why its powerful promise wasn't more obvious from the start. What technology am I talking about? Personal computers in 1975, the Internet in 1993, and—I believe—Bitcoin in 2014.... The gulf between what the press and many regular people believe Bitcoin is, and what a growing critical mass of technologists believe Bitcoin is, remains enormous....

Bitcoin at its most fundamental level is a breakthrough in computer science.... Bitcoin gives us, for the first time, a way for one Internet user to transfer a unique piece of digital property... safe and secure... and nobody can challenge the legitimacy.... Digital signatures, digital contracts, digital keys... digital ownership of physical assets... a distributed network of trust that does not require or rely upon a central intermediary.... Bitcoin is a digital currency, whose value is based directly on two things: use of the payment system today—volume and velocity of payments running through the ledger—and speculation on future use of the payment system.... It is perhaps true right at this moment that the value of Bitcoin currency is based more on speculation than actual payment volume.... Critics of Bitcoin point to limited usage by ordinary consumers and merchants, but that same criticism was leveled against PCs and the Internet at the same stage. Every day, more and more consumers and merchants are buying, using and selling Bitcoin, all around the world....

Bitcoin is a four-sided network effect... (1) consumers who pay with Bitcoin, (2) merchants who accept Bitcoin, (3) "miners" who run the computers that process and validate all the transactions and enable the distributed trust network to exist, and (4) developers and entrepreneurs.... All over Silicon Valley and around the world, many thousands of programmers are using Bitcoin as a building block for a kaleidoscope of new product and service ideas that were not possible before.... International remittance[s]... bring a much larger number of people around the world into the modern economic system... micropayments... protesters... by literally holding up signs that let people anywhere in the world who sympathize with them send them money on the spot. Bitcoin is a financial technology dream come true for even the most hardened anticapitalist political organizer. The coming years will be a period of great drama and excitement revolving around this new technology....

I hope that I have given you a sense of the enormous promise of Bitcoin. Far from a mere libertarian fairy tale or a simple Silicon Valley exercise in hype, Bitcoin offers a sweeping vista of opportunity to reimagine how the financial system can and should work in the Internet era, and a catalyst to reshape that system in ways that are more powerful for individuals and businesses alike...

---

Not Andreessen’s finest hour. Not his finest hour at all.