You may have seen this:
http://bitcoinmagazine.com/paypal-considers-bitcoin/And perhaps thought this was an example of "big business" looking to jump onboard something new and innovative. What you likely dont know is that the establishment of a borderless, non-governmental crypto-currency was infact the motivation and original goal behind PayPal way way back in the early 1990s!
Thiel and Levchin had hoped PayPal would grow to become an extra-governmental system of currency, something reminiscent of the world described in Neal Stephenson's novel Cryptonomicon, in which programmers use encryption to create an offshore data haven free from government control.
Thiel is a philosophy major who drew inspiration from Aleksandr Solzhenistyn; Levchin a Ukranian Jew who grew up in the former Soviet Union and immigrated to Chicago with his family in 1991. They met in Silicon Valley in the late 1990s and over a series of lunches began to collaborate on marketing a method of data encryption that would let users safely send information between two personal digital assistants (Palm Pilots, for example). Thiel and Levchin eventually decided that the most practical application of the technology was money--specifically, the ability to "beam" funds between PDAs without currency, checks, or credit cards. At a conference in July 1999, representatives from Nokia Ventures and Deutche Bank used the encryption technology to send Thiel $3 million in venture capital via a Palm Pilot. Confinnity, later to become PayPal, was born.
A speech Thiel gave to Confinnity employees, just a few days after he began work, in which he described his hopes for PayPal to become a borderless private currency.
For whatever mysterious reason, this is no longer mentioned on the Wiki page, but it was definitely the aim at one point. While obviously this isnt how it panned out, it would be interesting and humourous to see it come full circle (via support for VCs) would it not?
