Bitcoin Forum

http://altcoinpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/patrick_byrne_view-660x400.jpg

Yesterday, during an interview with Jason Burack, host of the YouTube program WallStForMainSt, Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, predicted that within 7 to 8 years cryptocurrency would rock the very foundations of the World.

During the YouTube Interview, the Indiana-born entrepreneur discusses a wide range of topics – from his fear of being “locked up” in prison – to his vision of how digital currency will alter life as we know it.

Candidly sharing his thoughts about jail, Byrne said:

"I have ticked off a lot of people in Washington. So I took up yoga the last few years, because it’s the only sport you can do in a jail cell."

In regards to cryptocurrency, the CEO had this to say:

"The people that are involved in Crypto (have a sense) that this will be bigger than the Internet. It could be a bigger change for society than the Internet itself."

Many of Patrick’s comments resonated with my vision of the future landscape, and serve to reinforce my belief that alternative currencies are the wave of the future.

This writer can envision the day where Goldcoin (GLD) is the number one cryptocurrency around the globe, bringing freedom and independence to a corrupted system previously controlled by the banking elite.

Patrick M. Byrne is the CEO of the Internet retailer Overstock.com. Byrne received his B.A. from Dartmouth, studied at Cambridge University as a Marshall Scholar, and earned a PhD in Philosophy from Stanford University. He co-founded Overstock.com in 1997 and became CEO in 1999.

Full Story: http://altcoinpress.com/2014/10/patrick-byrne-cryptocurrency-will-be-bigger-than-the-internet-itself/

He's a good guy, I really like Patrick Byrne. But this crap...

..made me chuckle. Altcoins will be a joke (http://trilema.com/2014/the-woes-of-altcoin-or-why-there-is-no-such-thing-as-cryptocurrencies/) / "remember when..." story within 5 years.

Mr Bryne may be a bit eccentric. But he is certainly right, Overall, Cryptocurrencies and applications dealing with the blockchain, will be Huge. However Bitcoin itself will fade away, no serious investors in for the long haul will buy into Bitcoin with the dangers of a 51% attack by the mining pools, the huge risk of Satoshi's 1million Bitcoin stash being hacked and/or sold, and the plague of negative attention on Bitcoin especially when it comes with it's own Foundation Members(Convicted felon Charlie Shrem, Accused Child Molestor Brock Pierce).

http://www.sonlte.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/FUD-320x240-300x225.jpg

FUD more please. I guess the current ~ 8 billion dollars invested were from "non-serious" investors like myself.

Yeah, just like HTTP did after we developed CSS and java.. oh wait..

It's quite amusing that you classify anything that goes against your investment as FUD. I'm a Bitcoin investor too, and I have absolutely no problem with acknowleding that my investment may have been a wrong one.

Your comment of HTTP vs CSS and Java, doesn't quite make sense. Bitcoin is a supposed currency, not a coding language. Bitcoin is 5 years old and already has decent media exposure. The internet at this time(5 years with good exposure), was making enormous leaps and bounds and in the middle of a trillion dollar bubble, while Bitcoin at this time is in a series of minor pumps and dumps after it's reveal that a bot was behind all the major price rises.

Bitcoin has crutches that simply cannot be overcome, with the main 2 being the bot Willy, which fabricated Bitcoin's entire pump/dump history, as we now know it was behind All of Bitcoin's major pumps and dumps: http://willyreport.wordpress.com/2014/05/25/the-willy-report-proof-of-massive-fraudulent-trading-activity-at-mt-gox-and-how-it-has-affected-the-price-of-bitcoin/, and the 2nd being Satoshi Nakamoto stash of 1million Bitcoins. No investor in their right mind, as of now, would buy into Bitcoin with these crutches. I believe that Satoshi's stash of 1million Bitcoin's proves that this "currency" is just a test, a toy, as he surely must have known the horrible implications that his intensive mining would have caused(Complete lack of serious investments by companies and the like).

Oh, my mistake. I had it all wrong, I will immediately pull my life savings from bitcoin. Now if you'd be so kind as to enlighten me, which scamcoin should i reinvest in, shill? Is it Goldcoin perhaps?

I do not promote Any altcoins, I have simply come to believe that there is more merit in Altcoins than there is in Bitcoin. I'm not trying to convince you, you'll just have to learn the hard way...

If you can't look at http://willyreport.wordpress.com/2014/05/25/the-willy-report-proof-of-massive-fraudulent-trading-activity-at-mt-gox-and-how-it-has-affected-the-price-of-bitcoin/, and see that Bitcoin's entire price rise history was fabricated by a illegal bot using fake fiat to buy bitcoins and pump/dump them, and see that Satoshi Nakamoto effectively premined 1million Bitcoins, and make your own realization that this currency Bitcoin, maybe wasn't intended to be taken seriously, then you cannot be helped.

Can something that is built around the internet become bigger than it? I don't think it can. You could compare bitcoin to the rise of the internet, but let's not forget bitcoin relies on it.

Looks like specifically it is talking about goldcoin. What is this doing here in the bitcoin discussion thread

nonsense.

Just the OP's lousy attempt to promote his coin on the main forum.

For the record, P Byrne has nothing to do with GLD.

Excellent question, it appears to be thinly-disguused propaganda for Goldcoin posing as an article about the man.

Exactly. Altcoiners are getting more desperate every day.
Most of the altcoins won't survive. Also, a cryptocurrency backed by gold is a serious misconception.

Patrick is an interesting character. I hope he does not end up in jail, because the bitcoin community needs people like him.

ya.ya.yo!

Altcoins are bull shit.

BTC will be the only cryptocurrency to prevail.

I think the Bitcoin devs currently are colluding too much with the U.S government, it will certainly become a success, but it makes me wonder what kind of changes Gavin and his team are going to implement, once we start hearing about a fixed rate of inflation patch and stuff that will be when Bitcoin is doomed.

But hey, this is why Bitcoin was made open source in the first place and why we have altcoins :P

FTFY


They cannot really implement any changes without the general consensus. Even the proposed hard-fork resolving max block size and blockchain size issues (so something that vast majority agree with) won't be an easy thing to do.

Fixed rate inflation idea is unrealistic atm, it can happen if it's 100% proven that the tx fees are not sufficient to keep the network running, but that probably won't happen during our lifetimes. Time will tell.

The whole point of fees is to keep an incentive for miners to maintain the network, theoretically if we ever hit the maximum coins in our lifetime there will be so many transactions going on miners may actually make more money than they would just creating the coins because of the amount of trading going on. As for everything else, don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those conspiracy theorist people that think the government is all powerful and will hunt us all down, but I do think they're going to try and do something about Bitcoin for sure.

^ This person doesn't understand how bitcoin evolves. Spoiler: It's democratic by consensus or not at all.

This. It's no wonder the general public doesn't understand bitcoin, we've got hero members on our own forum who apparently don't understand it.

We won't. Maximum coins will be reached in year 2140.

Way to spam without reading :D

Five Reasons You Need to Break Your Emoticon Addiction (http://www.hollabackhealth.com/2010/12/five-reasons-to-stop-using-emoticons/)

1. The blockchain might very well revolutionize many things, but not necessarily Bitcoin.  Bitcoin is just a small example of what the blockchain can do.  Bitcoin is definitely heading towards revolutionizing things.  It will be big, but it might not be the biggest or best use case of the blockchain.  

2.  The blockchain and/or Bitcoin will never be bigger than the internet because they are a slice of it.  To have somebody that is so "smart" use such a poor allegory is kind of frustrating.  Bitcoin and the blockchain are currently existing as just a section of the internet and there for a part can't be bigger than its whole.  

One of the leaders of Coinbase gave a more realistic prediction the other day.  He said Bitcoin will revolutionize financial matters to about the same extent that the internet revolutionized the mass media.  The old outlets of mass media like movies, TV, newspapers, books, and magazines still exist today, but the internet has eaten into some of these areas and created whole new areas on its own like blogs, Wikipedia, Youtube, Netflix, iTunes and more, all of which were made possible by the internet.  I wonder what the new blogs, Wikipedia, Youtube, Netflix, and iTunes of bitcoin will be.  Whole new ways of thinking about money, just like the internet gave us a whole new way to think about mass media. 

Yoga in jail lol... he will have a lot of time to practice soon. Overstock is a joke.

I think decentralization can be bigger than the internet is now in the future. Enabling technologies rely on each other however (is the Internet bigger than electricity?), but I think he was just trying to illustrate a point.

Myth. Bitcoin can be used without the internet. Paper wallets are one example, physical coins are another, sending bitcoin through SMS (dumb) phones is another, transmitting bitcoin via radio waves is yet another.

Bitcoin can and will be bigger than the internet. Because money is far, far bigger than the internet. Not everyone on this planet is online, but everyone uses money.

Your suggestion basically makes bitcoin more of a hassle to use than the thing you want it to replace(money ).Sure, almost everyone on Earth uses money but bitcoin isn't money, at least not in its current state and even less so in the diminished capacity that you describe.

You're mistakenly assuming that bitcoin on the net and bitcoin offline are mutually exclusive. That is not the case. And bitcoin is not only money, it is the best form of money ever to exist.

I never assumes such a thing.However,Bitcoin's success  rides on the convenience that the internet provides(the same way credit card's rides upon the innovation of global telecommunication network).Without it bitcoin would become more cumbersome, thus becomes quite inefficient and far less attractive than conventional form of money.

As to whether or not bitcoin is the best form of money to exist , that still remains to be seen.

Yes, and Youtube today is bigger than the entire internet in 1998.  But Youtube today is not bigger than the internet of today.  

I sincerely hope that bitcoin and other blockchains and the decentralization movement in 10 years is bigger than the whole internet today.  That would mean two things.  1. that democratization of money and contracts has happened. 2. I will be rich. hehehe



I'm not exactly sure if you really understand Bitcoin.  All of those things your mentioned all just connect right back to the blockchain which is on the internet.  For instance there is no such thing as a paper blockchain made of paper wallets, or a physical blockchain made of physical bitcoins, or SMS blockchain that works with SMS, or a radio wave blockchain that works with radio waves.  Yes, not all aspects of Bitcoin exist solely on the internet, but for them to be a part of Bitcoin, they must eventually connect back to the internet and the blockchain that lives within it.  So in the case that a small aspect of Bitcoin is turned into a physical bitcoin, or paper wallet or radio wave, all those things are just representations of what is happening on the blockchain within the internet.  

Technically/technologically , it is possible to built a network completely separate from the internet based on  what Beliathon suggest ,  unfortunately it would be so unwieldy, so slow,so much more work needed(infrastucture,interface ,funding etc) that you might as well kill bitcoin right ahead than put it through such sorry state of existence(for younger readers think Voldermort from "The Philosopher's Stone").Bitcoin in that state would never be  a threat let alone replace the comtemporary currencies he so loathed.

yes, technically speaking we could have a centralized paper blockchain with people flipping through pages and mailing paper wallets back and forth. but.......

All of the Overstock customers now have their wealth destroyed by Bitcoin in their sleep last night. What a wonderful public relations tactic. Maybe when your suicide cult followers are all dead then your earnings will go up a whole quarter per share.

If the Overstock customers do not own the private keys then they got Goxxed.  :D


Cryptocurrrency can and will grow far bigger than the internet. We are in the beginning of a new wave in technology. Bitcoins are not just digital coins, they are the start of a completely new technological era.

Patrick is talking his own book as usual, bloke owns a few mn worth of btc
Not saying I disagree though

As long as Byrne is operating his biz in a legal way there's nothing the pissed off people in DC can do to him in terms of jailing him. Not to mention, I'm sure he's got a top shelf litigation team and he doesn't seem to be a criminal in any way. Furthermore, it's not like he has to live here in the US if he doesn't want to. He can join the rest of the bunch that's went offshore.

It would not make any sense to do this. It would increase costs if you were to build a new/separate network just to relay messages like this

Cryptocurrrency can and will grow far bigger than the internet. We are in the beginning of a new wave in technology. Bitcoins are not just digital coins, they are the start of a completely new technological era.
[/quote]

Okay, I need some clarity here. 

Again, cryptocurrencies are digital, the internet is the home of the digital.  How can cryptocurrency ever possibly be bigger than the internet?  For example think of the internet as a pie, crypto as a slice.  The slice may never be bigger than the whole pie. 


So they aren't just digital?  What are they?  Made of gas, fire, dirt?  They are indeed digital tokens and nothing more.  Even a paper wallet or physical bitcoin is just a physical world representation of the digital token, but without the core digital token the paper wallet or physical bitcoin is worthless. 

And yes, we are at the start of a completely new technological era.  The blockchain is absolutely amazing.  The changes it will bring are things we aren't even aware of yet.  But it is just a digital token.  The thing that is amazing is that because it is a digital token it can now do things and be programmable in ways that tokens in an analog world were not.  Times are changing.

Hypothetically if the internet didn't exist, where would we "download" the blockchain from?

Except that Overstock is "cooking the books".

Wonder why Overstock has a P/E ratio of 5? Because the market still assumes Overstock is making up numbers:

http://www.sequenceinc.com/fraudfiles/2007/08/overstockcom-cooking-the-books/

"The bottom line is this: Byrne and Overstock management have made statements about their inventory that cannot possibly all be true. They are in conflict and cannot coexist, therefore at least some of the statements must be false."

Expect yoga in jail soon.

Everything is bigger in the future.