Distributed Ledger Quotes

Blockchain technology represents a generational opportunity to mutualize database infrastructure across entities within financial services. What that translates into is an enormous cost-saving, risk-reducing, and capital-enhancing opportunity.

Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer, decentralized form of money, as durable as the Internet itself. Remember, the Internet - or DARPA, as it was originally called - was created as a fail-safe, global network with no 'single point of failure.' If one part goes down, data takes another route, and nothing is lost.

2016 has proven to be the year where the most forward-thinking financial institutions are actually using blockchain technologies for payments and settlement rather than as an experiment.

Bitcoin is a technological tour de force

Ethereum has taken what was a four-function calculator of a programming language in Bitcoin and turned it into a full-fledged computer.

Facebook is like the Internet: a large company and an application. Bitcoin is a protocol for decentralisation, so you could build a decentralised company on top of it, a stock market. It's an Internet of ownership, so it's not quite a direct comparison.

The bigger thing with bitcoin is not bitcoin itself, but what does that decentralized technology really do?

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 is a currency, bitcoin is a network, bitcoin is a technology and you can't separate these things. A consensus network that bases its value on the currency does not work without the currency.

Initially, I thought that Ethereum was a thing that would be used for people to write simple financial scripts. As it turns out, people are writing stuff like Augur on top of it.

I have no problem with the financial industry inviting the Trojan Horse of blockchain technology into their walled garden. Because I know how powerful the technology is.

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.

When I came up with Ethereum, my first first thought was, 'Okay, this thing is too good to be true.' As it turned out, the core Ethereum idea was good - fundamentally, completely sound.

The thing I think is often misunderstood about Ripple is people say, 'Oh, Ripple is a centralized platform.' To me, this is a legacy perspective. Ripple's technology, IRP, is open source; XRP Ledger is open source.

The Internet of Money, bitcoin, is releasing 50 yrs. of pent up innovation in finance, because it offers innovation without permission.

The Ethereum client is literally a fork of Chromium's webkit backend. The idea is that users can build their own interfaces with HTML/JavaScript just like websites, and they will be viewable with the browser much like websites are viewable with the web browser.

Cryptocurrencies will create a fifth protocol layer powering the next generation of the Internet.

For the foreseeable future, I'm all about building blockchain-based decentralized services.

When asked to explain this space, I often ask people to forget pretty much everything you've heard about blockchains, crypto-currencies, and bitcoin, and instead dumb it down a lot and think about something no more complex or intimidating than good old-fashioned database technology.

You can write anything that you would be able to write on a server and put it onto the blockchain. Instead of Javascript making calls to the server, you would be making calls to the blockchain.

I think the whole narrative of blockchain without bitcoin will amount to very little.

The right way to think about the blockchain is that it's going to replace the entire Internet.

Distributed ledger technology is fashionable. In fact, if you could wear it, you'd put Ralph Lauren out of business, at least in my case.

For the first time in 6,000 years of human history, we can have peer-to-peer exchange where trust is not a problem anymore. And it's through the technology that underlies bitcoin. It's called the block chain.

The thing that I often ask startups on top of Ethereum is, 'Can you please tell me why using the Ethereum blockchain is better than using Excel?' And if they can come up with a good answer, that's when you know you've got something really interesting.