Ed Felten, Deputy U.S. Chief Technology OfficerI know a fair amount about Bitcoin, having co-written some papers and a textbook about it as an academic before I joined the White House.
Bitcoin is a new kind of thing that hasn’t existed in quite the same form before. Transactions can be verified entirely in software, with fewer (or vastly different) trust assumption than previous systems required. And the system is governed differently than previous currency-like technologies---Bitcoin is governed more like an open source project.
https://www.quora.com/What-does-the-White-House-think-of-cryptocurrencies-such-as-bitcoin
