via Big Think
Wences Casares is one of the great technology entrepreneurs of the past 20 years.
The son of a Patagonian sheep farmer, Casares has founded and sold several major startups since he launched Argentina’s first ISP in 1994. After selling the digital wallet company Lemon last year for $43 million, Casares set his sights on Bitcoin.
His latest enterprise is called Xapo, a Bitcoin wallet, vault, and debit card. And while Casares has a vested interest in talking up the digital currency, it’s Bitcoin’s revolutionary appeal that got him into the business in the first place. Xapo began as his own personal vault when he started buying the currency three years ago.
“[Bitcoin] has all of the qualities of a great ledger made in digital. And because of that it’s probably the best form of money we’ve ever seen.”
In order to understand why Bitcoin is so remarkable, Casares explains that you have to understand money and its history.
“Perhaps the concept that is hardest for us to understand now about money is that money is and has always been a ledger. People often ask “what is money backed with?” and the truth is money’s not backed with anything.”
That’s right. Your dollar or euro is only valuable because society has deemed it so. Gold is the same way. Nothing backs gold. It serves as a ledger primarily because of its scarcity. We’ll talk more about gold in a second.
Another myth dispelled by Casares is that money was introduced as a technology to replace barter:
The Latest on: Bitcoin
via Google News
The Latest on: Bitcoin
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via Bing News
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