This is a really articulate writer and blogger,

and he's been somewhat of a proselytizer

as well as an investor in the Bitcoin phenomenon.

Why should we care about Bitcoin?

First, a lot of the attention, initially, I think,

was paid to the idea of Bitcoin as an alternate currency.

That tends to be more kind of people

with a political agenda, sort of anti-Federal Reserve,

things like that.

For people like me, like investors and sort of technologists

and engineers, first of all,

it's interesting just as a payment system.

Number two is, this idea

that Bitcoin could be kind of a protocol for money

on the Internet and enable lots of new behaviors.

So, people have talked for decades about micropayments.

You know, we now have, basically, micropayments

on smartphoness with what are so called in-app payments,

like, as you're playing a game, you can pay a dollar

and get more goods on Supercell.

That's turned out to be an

incredibly successful business model.

And so, in theory, Bitcoin could enable similar kind

of innovation in payments in areas outside

of the smartphones.

Number three, I would say, forgetting about Bitcoin

as a currency, just the technology, the architecture,

and you'll hear more and more about this,

what people call the Blockchain architecture, which is,

we think of the Internet as decentralized.

In fact, a lot of the services are centralized, for example,

DNS and certificate authorities for SSL;

there's a whole bunch of central points of failure,

and there's all these efforts now

using Blockchain technology to make those fully distributed,

which can solve a lot of problems.

The last point I'd make about Bitcoin is,

you can kind of think of Bitcoin

as the largest software R&D company in the world.

There are thousands if not tens of thousands

of very, very smart engineers who are super-excited

about Bitcoin and working on Bitcoin-related projects.

You know, 40 years ago,

that the great computer science innovations came

out of places like Bell Labs.

Now, if you look at the last 20 years, the Internet, Linux,

all sorts of open-source stuff, it's all come

from these kinds of distributed communities, and right now,

those distributed communities are excited about Bitcoin.

Our view is, we want to invest in things

that those communities are excited about.

Well, I'm wondering whether some of them are excited

because of the technology possibilities,

or whether because they have,

they're, like, hard-core libertarians.

Do you find that as an obstacle in the eventual fulfillment

of Bitcoin's promise?

I think it's definitely created a PR issue, in that,

in a lot of people's minds, Bitcoin's associated

with these kinds of either extreme political views

or illegal activities.

All of the great computing movements actually had

political components to them.

This is the first one that,

it's sort of a right-wing component;

I think the past were all left-wing kind of movements.

The computing movement came out of a lot

of the sixties counterculture, Wikipedia,

this kind of stuff, was sort of this free information,

everyone's a publisher, kind of political movement.

The open source came out of the free software movement,

which is very political, anti-intellectual property.

So I would argue that,

you almost need these political movements

to sustain these things,

like how would you have sustained Bitcoin from 2009

until it became popular 12, you know,

if you didn't have a whole bunch

of kind of research, but imagine if AOL had won instead

of the open Internet, right?

It seems obvious enough to us now,

the open Internet is better and wins.

It wasn't obvious in 1992.

I mean, you had a multi-billion-dollar well-funded company,

ads on TV that would show your AOL address, not your URL.

It was very important that the Internet won, and it enabled,

like, PayPal, eBay, a whole bunch of these, YouTube,

they were pretty aggressive early on,

like YouTube had a lot of copyrighted material.

If the Internet had been centralized,

would YouTube have ever gotten off the ground?

Would PayPal have ever gotten off the ground?

I would argue that probably half of the services

that people here use and love were

at one time very controversial,

and if you have a central gatekeeper deciding

what is allowed and what isn't,

you significantly decrease the amount of innovation,

and so payments are one of the areas now

that are still locked up.

Go read forums about PayPal, and, like,

they decide what merchants are acceptable and what aren't.

It's a significant, I would argue, constraint on innovation,

and so, you know, I, as somebody who, I like to think

of myself as pro-innovation, like, I think these kinds

of open-infrastructure platforms are very, very important.