Nice interview, he doesnt know much about blockchain tech does he? I hope he researchers CP as you suggested. Im surprised he calls Byrne his good friend, yet CP never came up when they talked…
I don’t get the impression that Jeffrey cares about learning the tech at all. His platform appears to be based on proving the culture of Bitcoin is ‘bad’, which IMO, doesn’t seem terribly practical.
With respect to Jeffery Robinson, he does provide counter arguments to Bitcoin, not that all counter arguments are entirely correct and he does seem to stretch the truth in some cases. I doubt Tim Draper is causing a pump and dump, he publicly stated that he bought Bitcoin from an exchange at 200 dollars per bitcoin during the last flash crash to 160. I consider Draper as having more integrity than trying to trick young techies into parting with their bitcoin through price manipulation. However, you won’t find many people in the Bitcoin community that speak of many negative attributes of Bitcoin because lets face it, many people that are part of the community are infatuated with Bitcoin myself included.
The Hawala or Hawaladar system he mentioned goes by many names in regional economies. However, it is operated by Brokers and has fees. It is sometimes person to person, relative to relative, but that would require a rich person or relative to be the first point of contact in the destination country. He is correct in stating that it is based on honor, which almost completely eliminates trust issues if you are dealing with a known party.
Counterparty can act as the Broker, eliminating the actual currency passing or being exchanged through anyone. CP is the Hawala Broker. CP can also be a simple link in the Hawala chain. If BTC or Fiat is the currency, a Token can serve as the promise for that excahnge or an actual pegged representitive asset for the local currency between traditional Hawaladars. I think we will see this applied in the unbanked sectors of the Middle East and South West Asia. (Just my $.02)
I realized it’s quite possible to profit on the contrarian perspective around Bitcoin. He may not even necessarily be against it. At this point it’s difficult to gauge whether he truly doesn’t understand how it works.
I assume this kind of mindset will stick around for a long time, so there is clearly an audience for it.
A similar example would be Ann Coulter, who is clearly just trolling everyone and banking on controversy. But then again, Poe’s law makes it impossible to distinguish whether something is authentic anyway.
But if we really think about it, the Bitcoin echo chamber can be much worse at times. People were 100% certain that one BTC would be $10,000+ right now. I’m sure it would be possible to find people who hate / love Bitcoin even if it replaces the dollar.
His criticism of the ‘religion’ of Bitcoin isn’t entirely wrong. I find the culture around Bitcoin rather endearing, but it’s highly understandable to me why others may not. Nonetheless, the culture is irrelevant to the technology, and he can’t seem to grasp that part.
Though, it’s very, very, very funny to watch him try to grapple with “The blockchain is important… but not Bitcoin” mantra.
I think that many people within the Bitcoin space just have many misconceptions on the speed at which Bitcoin adaption will happen. Major Bitcoin adoption will happen and when it does we can expect to see a $10’000 Bitcoin if not more. It’s just that this could take 3, 5 or even 10 years. The ball is certainly rolling now and it took 6 years just to get to this point. But its been said many times we are in a very early period. I personally think we are in a much more early period than many people are currently anticipating. That is because there is a lot of mental resistance to Bitcoin acceptance, first of all the name sounds like Bittorrent which is attributed to illegal downloads. Also, people are not used to attributing the creation of money to know central entity, if you really think about that really is weird, lots of things about Bitcoin are insanely weird, even the fact that know one even knows who created it. This is why it’s mainly kids that are getting involved with Bitcoin. Money is also linked to national pride and people find hard to let these things go. Thing is Jeffery obviously has bias against Bitcoin. Does he even know that Microsoft is letting users pay in Bitcoin, that is a huge deal. One of the largest multinational corporations in the world gave Bitcoin a stamp of approval! We have some of the smartest people in the world working on making Bitcoin happen, these are the pioneers that shall make it possible for the masses to use and feel comfortable with it. In the mean time it’s pretty much sheep mentality. I think the next Bull trend will make a lot more heads turn than the last one of 2014. I think we are now in a leveling off period, Im guessing price will float between $180 to $300 maybe for the rest of the year before we start to rising slowly. Next price rise will get more investors and merchants interested and people will start spending Bitcoin again which will generate more interest too. Too much venture capital in Bitcoin for it to fail. Insane amount of money.