Patrick M. Byrne

“Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are a form of money that's a stable field that the government can't destroy and can't distort. Because its creation is governed by the laws of mathematics. It can't happen any faster or slower than a certain rate, and it all sort of self-adjusts.”

“There are regulators at the SEC and elsewhere who are really excited about the potential of the blockchain. They understand you can build a robust financial system - it would solve all your black swan problems. All kinds of mischief and games that are played in the current system become impossible in this system.”

“This is where the block chain is most useful and revolutionary: It helps us to overcome the problem of mutual trust in exchange, which will, in turn, make many of our modern central institutions unnecessary.”

“There are dodgy characters in Bitcoin. But there are dodgy characters in cash, too.”

“With the block chain, for the first time, we no longer need these central institutions for settlement or for guaranteeing the value of coins or for land titling. All of these functions can be replaced by a transparent public ledger that is safe from tampering and which can make value and ownership clear and open for everyone.”

“The virtues of the blockchain is that it would be that it's peer-to-peer settlement - no centralized settlement, no manipulation... And most importantly, there's nothing to capture. It's consensus based. It's stateless.”

“You're going to start seeing open-source, self-executing contracts gradually improve over time. What the Internet did to publishing, blockchain will do to about 160 different industries. It's crazy.”

“I've been in a room in Silicon Valley where on the wall they have 160 industries they think blockchain can disrupt. We picked six of them to focus on.”

“A major impediment to economic advancement around the world is the fact that the vast majority of humans are unbanked.”

“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.”

“We know that flat and non-hierarchical systems use information best. I've tried to do that with my own company because it works better that way. And society at large will work better as well if we can get rid of these old institutions and hierarchies. New innovations like the block chain can make this possible.”

“How high can bitcoin go? The real question is how low can the dollar go?”

“There is an opportunity to recreate the financial world as we know it in the parallel universe that is the blockchain. We are writing rules for this whole new universe.”

“I've been all over meeting government ministers and such in Caribbean financial circles. There's a small blockchain movement in the Caribbean. They've been quite a bit more advanced than you might've imagined.”

“I'm not wed to bitcoin's blockchain. I'm blockchain-agnostic.”

“t0 is blockchain-agnostic so, ultimately, we can use anybody's blockchain.”

“We want a money that some government mandarin can't just whisk into existence with a pen stroke.”

“Cryptocurrencies in general give us a stable medium through which we can communicate our information about values and prices in a way that no government mandarin can distort or usurp. For the predators who have used our central institutions to predate on the rest of humanity, it's a very bad development.”

“On the blockchain, you have a public ledger, which is the form of ownership. That means you are not doing net settlement - just netting everything down, which means that everything has been turned into fungible numbers.”

“We are on a crazy strategy with our central bank. It's good to have alternative ecosystems. It's not that the dollar will go away, but we need other options if it crashes or wildly inflates.”