As shown in the 8-minute video below, Overstock.com founder and CEO Patrick Byrne appeared as a guest on Fox Business on Monday where he shared some great insights regarding bitcoin.
Is bitcoin here to stay? Patrick Byrne explained why it is.
“The underlying technology of bitcoin is the main event. It’s called block chain. And block chain is going to be as disruptive to all kinds of institutions, like banks, as the Internet was itself to publishing. So that’s really the main event.
A commodity turns into money when it becomes useful. This underlying technology of bitcoin, this thing called block chain, is extraordinarily useful and that is here to stay.”
The big banks and Wall Street prefer to keep things the way they are with the current financial system because they have it rigged in their favor. They view bitcoin as a threat to their magic kingdom because it would level the playing field for everyone with no more trickery and no chance for manipulation, just good old fashioned trading. So last week, J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Diamond launched a verbal attack on bitcoin, calling it a fraud.
“It’s worse than tulip bulbs. It won’t end well. Somebody is going to get killed. It’s just not a real thing. Eventually it will be closed. Anybody trading bitcoin for J.P. Morgan is going to be fired for just being stupid.”
Patrick Byrne gave a great rebuttal, exposing Jamie Diamond’s hypocrisy in saying bitcoin is not a real thing:
“A year and a half ago, Jamie Diamond wrote a letter to shareholders warning them this is going to come eat our lunch. He was scared to death of it. I think what they thought was that they could get in front of it and they’re realizing they can’t get in front of it.
China has taken a position just like Jamie Diamond where they have come out and suddenly they’re all afraid of it.
What do you know? The guys who run the post office don’t like federal express. The taxi companies don’t like Uber. The guys who belong to this financial world of debt based fiat money, central banking, Keynesian spending, this magic money tree that they all grew up in, they don’t like a form of currency that cannot be controlled by a government. What a surprise!
At least this bitcoin stuff is governed by the laws of mathematics in how much of it gets created. No one governs these government mandarins when they whisk new dollars into existence. They created 4 and a half trillion dollars in the last eight years. Bitcoin is coming into existence at a predefined rate, governed by mathematical principles.
With block chain, you can take out about 90% of the back office cost of all kinds of mechanisms and banks and stock market and such. That’s why Overstock has been pioneering the application of block chain on Wall Street. You cannot only take out the costs, but you can create a version of Wall street where no one can cheat. All kinds of mischief that happens on Wall Street cannot be done with the version of Wall Street that’s re-created on the block chain. What we have seen, and this is what I think scares Wall Street so much, what we’ve seen in the last 10 years, anyone who’s awake, has seen that these banks have found ways to buy themselves regulators, buy themselves Congressman and Senators and maybe judges and who knows what, but they cannot buy the laws of mathematics.”
Regarding security questions, the risk of getting hacked, Patrick said,
“Bitcoin itself has never been hacked. It’s the most hacked on thing in the world. Hackers have been attacking it for seven years, but never broken it. I used to study the mathematics underlying cryptography at Stanford. If people can break this cryptography, they can break the cryptography that underlies every credit card and everything in the world.”
When asked how high can bitcoin go, Patrick answered,
“The real question is how low can the dollar go. How low can all this fiat currency go. I have no idea where the price is going to go, but the usefulness is here to stay.”