Winklevoss twins: Bitcoin will be bigger than Facebook #bitcoin #facebook

[usamakhalid961]

  TheIt was on a very hot day in July 2012 that the Winklevoss twins discovered bitcoin, while partying in Ibiza. At 32 years old, the enviably athletic pair have both Harvard and Oxford on their CVs, and seem predestined for success. They famously won a $65m settlement from Facebook after claiming Mark Zuckerberg had stolen their idea for a Harvard social network, and rowed in the 2008 Olympics.

Yet their chance encounter with bitcoin in the Mediterranean was rather more serendipitous. “We were on vacation, and happened to bump into a guy who is mutual friend and he started to tell us about bitcoin," Tyler Winklevoss explains. “We were fascinated from day one," he says, hinting that having just abandoned five years of chasing Facebook through the courts, the time was right to start something new. "At the time we were just re-immersing ourselves inside the tech world, getting into the trenches again.”

Facebook's soaring value has been good news for the Winklevoss brothers and their investment business, and the pair are now two of the most influential players in a new generation of investors. Yet bitcoin, Winklevoss insists, has the potential to be even bigger than Facebook – currently riding a market value of $151bn.


"Bitcoin potentially could be more impactful because being able to donate 50 cents to someone across the world has more impact than potentially sharing a picture," he explains. “But they're very different. Facebook is like the internet – a large company and an application.

"Bitcoin is a protocol for decentralisation, so you could build a decentralised company on top of it, a stock market. It's an internet of ownership, so it's not quite a direct comparison." In the same way Facebook encouraged us to be socially open, bitcoin encourages us to be financially open, he argues. The Winklevoss vision is of a kind of decentralised financial utopia, where payments cannot be intercepted by middlemen and where developing countries have an equal stab at the global markets.

Winklevoss twins own 1% of $5.7bn market
Bitcoin already has a market capitalisation equivalent to $5.7bn – the approximate total of all bitcoin in existence – and feels far more than a novelty. The Winklevoss twins own an estimated 1% of all bitcoin, so have a real interest in making sure bitcoin is explored, exploited - and that it succeeds.

But Tyler's glowing optimism about Bitcoin's prospects is not shared by all in Silicon Valley. Veteran investor Marc Andreessen might be one of them, but Goldman Sachs recently reported that Bitcoin was too volatile to be viable.

“Calling bitcoin volatile – it's a non-statement. Unregulated assets with unclear regulatory landscapes are always going to be volatile. That's what unregulated assets do," said Winklevoss. “I can make the same argument about the internet in the early days. But sure enough, technologists came and worked hard at the problem, and it’s getting better.”

For Tyler, the bitcoin critics can be divided into two categories; those like the kind of Luddite who protested against new labour-saving machinery from 1811 to 1817, and today's teenagers who don’t have the ability to imagine the early days of the internet. “Bitcoin is going through growing pains," he says.

As we spoke, I came to discover that Tyler spends most of his time preaching the gospel of bitcoin, including at Oxford University this year. "It’s the only thing people want to know. The promise of the internet is being held back by Visa, Master Card, American Express," he explains. "You can’t buy stuff in the majority of the world - the majority of the world doesn’t have the financial inclusion we take for granted, which is a bank account and a way to save money.”

Mt Gox failed because of poor service
But if that's the case, what happened with MtGox? At one point it was the largest bitcoin exchange, but lost half a billion dollars to by hackers and was forced to close.

"Everybody was shocked at the magnitude of loss, but when you look, the writing was really on the wall for a long time”. Tyler and other active investors avoided the whole mess altogether, he explains, because they stopped using Gox when it became too slow to withdraw money.

He describes the loss as "painful", yet says ultimately the untimely death of Gox had been good for bitcoin. "Gox was a pattern of poor operations, poor customer service, poor PR. You can’t just take bitcoin and hide.” He's promoting his new venture - the bitcoin exchange Winxdex. “Right now bitcoin is priced differently depending on where you look, depending on what exchange, depending on who's trading, he says. “We essentially came up with a method which we think is the most accurate way to price bitcoin at that moment in time, and we’ll use that price to help create price discovery and stability in the bitcoin ecosystem.”

This year, the Winklevoss twins predict, will be the year that Wall Street will get involved. "If a new technology comes out and the incumbent doesn’t evolve, then they generally lose," he says, comparing bitcoin with the internet in 1994. He thinks he knows how this will end. "When it gets to tipping point it’s usually not a long fight. It’s a category killer.” brothers, two of the most influential players in a new generation of investors, say bitcoin will encourage financial openness               

                 

[waldox]

believe in bitcoin!

bitcoin is your saviour!

[usamakhalid961]

believe in bitcoin!

bitcoin is your saviour!

true

[Joshuar]

Bitcoin will def be bigger than facebook.

[Predatorian]

I hope BTC will be more worth than this facebook, time will show that us.

[abacus]

If interested, this news is being discussed here too:
Economics > Speculation > Winklevoss twins: Bitcoin will be bigger than Facebook
(I think that Economics or Economics>Speculation should be a more appropriate section).

[micky123]

Not really sure if these two dumbos can be trusted wrt their opinions (weren't they the ones who got duped by Zuckerberg?). Anyways, i do believe bitcoin is here to stay and as every product needs an endorsement, these two boneheads will do i suppose!

[MNDan]

If they are just talking market cap, duh. Of course it will. Kinda silly to think it would be bigger than Facebook in day to day impact on people's lives, though. In that regard - no chance.

[nkocevar]

Just think of how rich these guys will be when the price of bitcoin skyrockets again. They own 1% of all bitcoins. Imagine a bitcoin market cap of 10 trillion USD. They would have 100 Billion dollars. And also think of the power they would have over the currency exchange price.

[IIOII]

Facebook use is already declining in many industrialized countries. FB does not have a convincing use case other than socializing and entertainment. It's not real innovation (social networking already existed a long time before) but a fad and will die quickly when it fails stay hip in the younger age groups (which is already happening).

Bitcoin is revolutionary technology with countless use cases in world economy.

So the odds are clearly in favor of Bitcoin.

[BADecker]

Just think of how rich these guys will be when the price of bitcoin skyrockets again. They own 1% of all bitcoins. Imagine a bitcoin market cap of 10 trillion USD. They would have 100 Billion dollars. And also think of the power they would have over the currency exchange price.

Bitcoin isn't attached to anything. That is, you can't "redeem" bitcoins for anything like you could redeem dollars for gold or silver in the past.

There are methods for attaching bitcoins to specific material items so that they are redeemable by trading them for the actual item. Counterparty and Mastercoin are two methods that come extremely close to redeemable currencies, even though the idea of both of these is simply to use the blockchain, through the use of bitcoin, as the security method for their protocols.

The blockchain idea is a tremendous technology. When the combining of it with the idea of redeemable items comes about, there will no longer be any desire for the dollar, or for fiat currencies. Bitcoin, itself, may fall by the wayside... except for the use of its blockchain, that is.

[coindozer7]

Wiklevoss Twins are trying to revenge and slap back to Zuckerberg and Facebook since they lost the trial few years ago.
Bitcoin will become big but it will take some time to Bitcoin to get bigger than Facebook.
I can see the chance that to happen since they own 1% of the whole Bitcoin supply.

[moriartybitcoin]

I'm not sure I even understand why the Winklevoss's would compare Bitcoin to Facebook. The two share no similarities at all. Compare it to Paypal, or e-gold, or Liberty Reserve or even USD .. but not Facebook.

[Crindon]

The Winklevoss really know what is going on. They are really after a form of revenge on Facebook or at least a revenge on that lost deal.

[greenlion]

Facebook use is already declining in many industrialized countries. FB does not have a convincing use case other than socializing and entertainment. It's not real innovation (social networking already existed a long time before) but a fad and will die quickly when it fails stay hip in the younger age groups (which is already happening).

Bitcoin is revolutionary technology with countless use cases in world economy.

So the odds are clearly in favor of Bitcoin.

This is true, Facebook is just the end of the evolutionary line of something that started with Makeoutclub.

[greenlion]

I'm not sure I even understand why the Winklevoss's would compare Bitcoin to Facebook. The two share no similarities at all. Compare it to Paypal, or e-gold, or Liberty Reserve or even USD .. but not Facebook.

Network effect is the similarity.

[Phinnaeus Gage]

The Winklevoss really know what is going on. They are really after a form of revenge on Facebook or at least a revenge on that lost deal.

So that is why Facebook let KnC use that helicopter hanger next door at The Node Pole to build their mega-pharm having fully functional bitcoin miners hashing away.

"Everybody was shocked at the magnitude of loss, but when you look, the writing was really on the wall for a long time”. Tyler and other active investors avoided the whole mess altogether, he explains, because they stopped using Gox when it became too slow to withdraw money.

While everybody had problems withdrawing, the Windklevosses and other active deep-pocket investors bailed on Mt Coxs. That explains the warnings they and them investors espoused to us via all those forum posts and news releases. BRB, while I go hunt just ONE of said down. BTW, to conduct said search, which keywords should I use?  

[Ron~Popeil]

There has been a lot of positive news this week. I am thinking we could actually see another big rise this summer.

[TaunSew]

Bitcoin isn't even that liquid yet, though.  What could they do if they had billions in Bitcoin?  Nothing really.

I thought it was well known that the twins were going to create some Bitcoin fund and sucker naive babyboomers to give them cash in hand.  The twins walk away with $Fiat in hand and the holders get a currency which might die or be replaced by an alt within 40 years.

[Divinespark]

The twins are talking their book
Pure and simple
Which is not to say they are wrong