Bitcoin expert view
At BitPay, she aims to get more charities, political organizations, and non-profits involved with bitcoin. She also serves as an advisor at the BitGive Foundation , and is an advocate for more diversity in the community: Catheryne Nicholson is CEO of BlockCypher , a company that gives developers the technology required to secure blockchain applications.
She refers to it as an Amazon Web Services for blockchain. The company runs multiple blockchains related to a range of different industries.
Nicholson believes that bitcoin is for the public good , because it is decentralised, and allows loans and financial support to be accessed by people who do not have any access to traditional banking systems. In the same interview, she called bitcoin "the euro for the world. After the collapse of Mt. Gox, many bitcoin enthusiasts preferred hardware bitcoin wallets to online equivalents. Trezor allows offline storage on a device slightly larger than a key fob.
It was the first device of its kind. Palatinus was the creator of the first bitcoin mining pool in Named Slush Pool , it is based on the concept of shared resource and has mined over a million bitcoins to date.
As a founder of the Bitcoin Foundation , Charlie Shrem understood the technology behind bitcoin from the earliest days of its release. But he was frustrated with the slow speed of currency exchange to and from bitcoin, and founded BitInstant in to make transactions faster.
Unfortunately, Shrem's need for speed would eventually be his downfall. He was convicted of violating anti-money laundering laws after selling bitcoin to Robert Faiella, who was involved with the Silk Road marketplace. Shrem plead guilty to unlicensed money transmitting in , and called himself "bitcoin's first felon. He wrote about the potential of using bitcoin in prison, pointing out that its ledger could be updated with Morse code if necessary.
After his release, he founded Intellisys Capital , a company that uses the ethereum blockchain for share trading. Nick Szabo is one of many cypherpunks that have been "outed" as the creator of bitcoin.
Stylometric analysis suggests that the language used by Szabo in his various papers is very close to Nakamoto's writing style. But Szabo has always denied that he is the inventor of bitcoin.
Despite this denial, Szabo was involved in the early development of the cryptocurrency. His pre-bitcoin project, bit gold , is regarded as a direct predecessor to bitcoin, because it used a shared ledger, rather than a central authority, to prevent fraud by duplicate transactions. Szabo now works on blockchain-based smart contracts, a concept he was developing before bitcoin was originally released. Having made his first million by the age of 25, Roger Ver went on to make far more through bitcoin in the following decade.
He is perhaps best known for giving up his US citizenship in , purchasing a passport in St Kitts and Nevis. Common payment methods, like debit or credit cards, also entail a surprising degree of trust.
Some of these problems go away with cash because when I hand cash to the grocer, there is no need for trusted intermediaries. But if you think about it, even cash requires some trust. The grocer has to believe that the cash I pay with will retain its value and not be eroded by inflation or confiscatory monetary reforms. So she needs to trust the central bank.
Have cryptocurrencies made progress toward solving the problem of mistrust? For example, a validator could check if there are sufficient funds in the account of the person who wants to make a payment. If there is, the payment will go through. If you recall the last time you swiped your credit or debit card, the few seconds you had to wait was that validation. Instead, everybody in the bitcoin network could be picked, essentially at random, to validate recent transactions. The details are a bit technical and more details can be found in a recent St.
Louis Fed paper on cryptocurrencies. Definitely, and this is likely related to trust also. Criminals, who typically use cash for the anonymity and security it provides, may be moving to cryptocurrencies.
The Drug Enforcement Administration reports a sharp decline in bulk cash smuggling in , which is the traditional payment method for drug shipments and suggests that payments may have shifted toward cryptocurrencies.
Cryptocurrencies are more convenient than cash for many illegal activities that now take place online. In , following a government crackdown on Silk Road —an online marketplace that was used to trade illegal goods—bitcoin prices plunged. And for good reason too. China , which actively controls capital flow, banned banks from dealing with bitcoin in this was relaxed later , because it was thought to be used for money laundering.
North Korea is reportedly responsible for state-sponsored hacks to steal cryptocurrencies, which help bypass economic sanctions that are enforced through the cooperation of financial institutions and countries. Earlier, we talked about how a currency requires people to trust in its value. When Greece fell deeper into financial distress in , Greek interests and trading in bitcoin rose quickly amidst fears of capital controls and the possibility of exiting the eurozone.
Armstrong is known for being outspoken about topics around bitcoin, both in terms of the technology and the culture that surrounds it. He has claimed that the currency will replace the US dollar by , and has been critical of some of the core developers involved in maintaining its core code. He is also a vocal supporter of Bitcoin Classic , a controversial upgrade to the block size which he says would help the platform to scale. Despite being a supporter of regulation, Armstrong has stated that he is also strongly in favor of privacy.
Victoria van Eyk is a self-confessed bitcoin obsessive, and describes bitcoin as a "way of life. As community development VP at ChangeTip, van Eyk was responsible for promoting the benefits of bitcoin micropayments.
ChangeTip closed when its workforce was absorbed into Airbnb. She continues to work with bitcoin companies, with particular focus on banking and mobile. Blythe Masters is one of the best-known proponents of blockchain as a tool for commercial banking systems. But Masters, who was a prodigy at JP Morgan, is a controversial figure in the community. While many bitcoin experts want to see blockchain used to liberate society from financial strictures, Masters seeks the opposite, "We're seeking to make [the current financial system] stronger, better, and safer.
Masters' company, Digital Asset Holdings , promotes the blockchain as a way of streamlining financial transactions. By taking the intermediary out of the process, banks could theoretically reduce costs and resources with their own distributed ledger systems, in the same way that bitcoin uses a shared ledger instead of a central bank record. Her version of the shared ledger adds hashing to ensure transactions are processed privately , which is key to ensuring transactions are hidden from public view.
While Blythe Masters is more active in blockchain discussions than bitcoin, she is arguably one of the experts most likely to edge the technology toward the mainstream. Regardless, bitcoin evangelists will likely give her a wide berth as she tries to commercialize the system. Elizabeth Ploshay McCauley is currently an account manager at BitPay , having previously been communications director at Bitcoin Magazine.
Ploshay McCauley is also on the board of the Bitcoin Foundation and is known as an evangelist for cryptocurrency. At BitPay, she aims to get more charities, political organizations, and non-profits involved with bitcoin.
She also serves as an advisor at the BitGive Foundation , and is an advocate for more diversity in the community: Catheryne Nicholson is CEO of BlockCypher , a company that gives developers the technology required to secure blockchain applications. She refers to it as an Amazon Web Services for blockchain.
The company runs multiple blockchains related to a range of different industries. Nicholson believes that bitcoin is for the public good , because it is decentralised, and allows loans and financial support to be accessed by people who do not have any access to traditional banking systems. In the same interview, she called bitcoin "the euro for the world.
After the collapse of Mt. Gox, many bitcoin enthusiasts preferred hardware bitcoin wallets to online equivalents. Trezor allows offline storage on a device slightly larger than a key fob.