I just got an email from a big company, telling me that it is investing in Bitcoin.
The message was very clear: if we want to become the next big thing, we have to invest in Bitcoin!
The news was just announced yesterday in The Financial Times.
It means a lot to me, because it shows that, if you want to be the next billion dollar company, you have to make sure that your investors are willing to take on the risk of investing in something that is going to go up in value, and that means you have got to make it easy for them to do that.
What I’m trying to do with this is to create a very open ecosystem.
There are no hidden rules.
The blockchain is open.
It’s available to everyone.
Everyone can look at it and say, “I think this is great”.
It’s open source.
I think we have a very exciting time ahead of us.
The biggest risk is that there will be too many ICOs that fail, and people will say: “I’m not going to invest, and my kids won’t go to college.”
If you want a company to grow big, you’ve got to take risks.
You can’t build a billion dollar business on the backs of people who have never heard of blockchain technology before.
It can’t be the first thing you do.
You have to be very innovative and very smart, because you want the next million dollars to be your contribution.
When I started to work with Bitcoin in the mid-2000s, it was a big deal.
The technology wasn’t very clear.
You needed to learn about it and understand how it works.
You could buy Bitcoins on the market.
You had to set up a wallet, send your money to it, wait for it to be sent, and then you could withdraw it.
In the early years, we had an amazing time in this space.
We did some amazing things and made money from it.
But then it all fell apart.
The big players in this industry started to shut down and block all the transactions.
The network was broken.
There was an arms race.
It wasn’t working.
The value of Bitcoin started to plummet.
It was just a massive waste of time.
Then, in 2012, things really took off.
We saw a huge increase in the adoption of Bitcoin as a currency.
It took Bitcoin for people to realise that it was the future of money.
We’re now seeing that Bitcoin is doing well, and the reason is because it’s been made for a specific purpose: to replace gold.
If you think about it, what is gold?
It’s a very solid, stable, scarce metal.
It has been around for thousands of years.
You only need a few kilograms to produce a gram of gold.
It doesn’t require a lot of technology to create.
Gold is like the American dollar.
It is the world standard for gold.
You see a lot more of it.
It works like a check, and it’s used in a lot, but there are no banks that can take it.
You’ve got a lot going on in the world, and there’s no real way of controlling it.
Gold isn’t just going to fall in value.
The way people are going to use it is going get more and more complicated.
And there’s a real risk that if we have too much of it, that it will lose its value.
That’s what Bitcoin is going through right now.
It needs to be regulated, but it needs to have its value increase by some amount that people can actually use.
We need to start seeing it being used as a real asset, not as a hedge against bad news.
To do that, it needs a better regulatory framework.
We are seeing Bitcoin companies being hacked and getting hacked again.
People are getting hacked and losing money.
The Bitcoin network is still a mess.
And that’s the main thing.
We have to put a regulatory framework in place to deal with the issue of money laundering, to deal in tax evasion, to handle this massive amount of money going into this economy.
That’s why I think the ICOs are such a big issue right now, because they are an issue of fraud and not of technology.
It used to be people would put money into Bitcoin and then buy things.
Now it’s all about speculation.
I’m not saying that people are all going to start doing this.
But it needs more regulation.
That means the banks have to get involved.
It will take some time to fix that.
I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to stop people from doing it.
I do know that we have more than a million people in the UK who are in a position where they have no bank account and they are relying on Bitcoin.
As a global financial centre, London is a world leader.
It houses the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund