Andreas Antonopoulos delivered an inspiring speech at the recent O'Reilly conference in San Francisco. I like where he emphasizes that the coin and the technology are inseparable:
“The media is refining the message, saying ‘The currency is a joke, but the technology — I don’t know, maybe there’s something there,'” he said. “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.”
This section where he counters the notion that last year was 'the worst year of bitcoin' is optimistic and on point:
“The companies that invented and deployed those two features did so in 2012 and we reap the benefits today. And in 2014, during ‘the worst year of bitcoin,’ 500 startups received $500 million in investment generating tens of thousands of jobs — and none of that innovation has come back yet, because they just started. Give us two years. Now what happens when you throw 500 companies and 10,000 developers at the problem? Give (it) two years and you will see some pretty amazing things in bitcoin.”
When I excitedly talk about bitcoin I focus on the open source and decentralized which I believe are revolutionary and the future of a global marketplace. Antonopoulos says is much more eloquently:
“You put an open, decentralized ecosystem: open source, open standards, open networking and the intelligence and innovation pushed all the way to the edge — put that against a closed system, controlled by a central provider, whose permission you need in order to innovate and who will only innovate at the exclusion and competition of all of the other companies — and we will crush them.”
via Inside Bitcoin