Fred Ehrsam

“OpenAI is doing important work by releasing tools which promote AI to be developed in the open. Compute power is largely produced by NVIDIA and Intel and still relatively expensive but openly purchasable. Blockchains may be the key final ingredient by providing massive pools of open training data.”

“People far too often associate derivatives markets with mere speculation, but there are very legitimate businesses that need derivatives to protect themselves against risk.”

“When Coinbase was starting, we thought we were seeing the birth of something that was really important - what I would almost describe as the future fabric of society - the system for who we are - our identities, what we own, our assets.”

“The scripting language in Bitcoin is important because it is what makes Bitcoin 'programmable money'. Within each Bitcoin transaction is the ability to write a little program.”

“Public crowdfunding still suffers from a tragedy of the commons problem. Everyone will want the benefit of the crowdfunded efforts but is incentivized to sit on the sidelines and hope others chip in.”

“If you are going to store your e-wallet on your own server, don't keep your e-wallet on your desktop, and make sure you use encryption. If you lose your computer, your bitcoins are lost forever.”

“The ability to easily buy and sell Bitcoin has been a really key factor in accelerating Bitcoin adoption.”

“The fundamentals of the token model are valuable and powerful. They allow communities to govern themselves, their economics, and rally a community in powerful ways that will allow open systems to flourish in a way that was previously impossible.”

“Bitcoin has a core technological innovation: The ability to publicly verify ownership, instantly transfer that ownership, and do so without the need for a trusted third party.”

“The self-driving car revolution was kicked off by The 'DARPA' Grand Challenge to make an autonomous car traverse 132 mi. of a desert.”

“Bitcoin's value is the same: It will remain as long as it is the most efficient mechanism for transferring ownership.”

“Private funding was one of the first methods used when MIT funded Bitcoin core developers Gavin Andresen, Wladimir van der Laan, and Cory Fields in 2015.”

“Make no mistake - Ethereum would never have existed without Bitcoin as a forerunner. That said, I think Ethereum is ahead of Bitcoin in many ways and represents the bleeding edge of digital currency.”

“Everything will be tokenized and connected by a blockchain one day.”

“Redistributing tokens is a balancing act. In most cases, forks probably want to keep ownership for users constant so users have at least the same incentives to use the new fork as the historical one.”

“When the Bitcoin white paper emerged in 2008, it was completely revolutionary. The amount of concepts that had to come together in just the right way - computer science, cryptography, and economic incentives - was astonishing.”

“Working on Ethereum could be similar to working at a Google: lower risk with broad impact right away. Working on a token is similar to working on a startup: higher risk and lower initial impact but higher upside potential.”

“Just as the Internet brought the cost of disseminating information down by an order of magnitude, bitcoin brings the cost of transferring ownership down by an order of magnitude.”

“Ethereum will be a first-class citizen on Coinbase.”

“Not having sub-governance would be like anyone who owns USD being able to walk into a Google shareholder meeting and voting without owning Google stock just because Google shares happen to be denominated in USD.”