Is Bitcoin a joke? People thought that about the internet too.

Source: 
Author: 
Coverage Type: 

A Q&A with Marc Andreessen, venture capitalist.

Bitcoin has enjoyed a meteoric rise. The value of one unit of the cryptocurrency has soared from $13 at the beginning of 2013 to $600. Investors have poured millions of dollars into Bitcoin-based startups. Yet Bitcoin still faces widespread skepticism. The payment system's many critics argue that it doesn't have any compelling advantages over the conventional financial system. And they say Bitcoin is hampered by security concerns, extremely volatility, and unsavory ties to the criminal underworld.

These criticisms give Andreessen a sense of deja vu. In 1994, he was an early adopter of another technology that was widely dismissed as an impractical fad: the Internet. He describes the "massive wall of negativity" he encountered when, as the co-founder of the browser company Netscape, he tried to convince major American companies to take the internet seriously.

Andreessen believes that Bitcoin has the same kind of disruptive potential that the internet had two decades ago. “Bitcoin could basically reconstruct the financial industry in an untrusted peer-to-peer environment. This is why all the technologists look at it and get excited,” Andreessen said.


Is Bitcoin a joke? People thought that about the internet too.