 Many people ask me, when Bitcoin will hit this and this price, I don't care about the price. I think the price is the least important part about Bitcoin. You could call them bubbles, you could call them irrational exuberance, like other people call it. And so you could compare the time that we're in right now to the late 90s. Will my children, will they think that in order for their money to be secure, in order for them to trade and exchange and have savings accounts, there is even the need and existence of a bank. The cryptocurrency jumped on the news reaching an all-time high of more than 50,000 people. This is backed purely by a belief. This is the biggest thing to happen in mankind. The world has been absolutely captivated by the drama of Bitcoin's meteoric rise and subsequent collapse. In December, the price of a single Bitcoin reached nearly US$20,000. By early February 2018, that price had dropped to below US$6,000. Prompting the economist Nuriya Rabini to tweet, the mother of all bubbles and biggest bubble in human history comes down crashing. A few days later, Rabini tweeted again, this time more ominously, predicting that Bitcoin's price would continue to drop until it hit zero. In the same week, the digital currency was dealt another serious blow when the general manager of the Bank for International Settlements likened the mania around Bitcoin to a combination of a bubble, a Ponzi scheme and an environmental disaster. Even before it lost nearly two-thirds of its peak value, Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Schiller may not have gone as far as sounding the death knell for the cryptocurrency but he did express a fair share of skepticism. I tend to think of Bitcoin as an experiment, it's an interesting experiment it's not a permanent feature of our lives. What Schiller did do, however, was point to Bitcoin's underlying tech, Blockchain, as the deserved focus of our attention. We're overemphasizing Bitcoin, we should broaden it out to Blockchain which will have other applications. If doomsayers are correct and the preeminent cryptocurrency is on the brink of collapse, what, if anything, will be its legacy? What becomes of, say, Blockchain? But before we get ahead of ourselves, what is Blockchain? Blockchain is a database, decentralized database. It's immutable, which means the information in Blockchain is permanent. It's a database of all of us. It's a way to build a system of record with nobody acting as God in the center of that system. So we can build cooperative networks and cooperative applications on top. One of those things we can build is a cryptocurrency. There isn't a Bitcoin Inc CEO. There isn't a Bitcoin headquarters somewhere. There's no one controlling as a company, as a centralized institution for Bitcoin. But it's completely decentralized. We've gotten really good in Silicon Valley and in the Internet community at building databases and web servers and things that allowed us to build big central services. Think Uber, right? Think PayPal. But we didn't really make it easy to build decentralized systems. And so Blockchain technology and the decentralized web, which is what we're getting, it really are a way to get there. I mean, I think the Blockchain is going to do really interesting things around the transfer of value. But this idea that it's like a decentralized system that's going to completely bypass the banks, I don't understand where that hype is coming from because the banks are the first to use the technology just to make the transfer of value more efficient. Whereas a lot of the discussions in the cryptocurrency community focus on how do we avoid the banking system, how do we create an alternative to it, banks themselves are realizing that this underlying Blockchain technology, they can use this underlying technology to automate a lot of systems that today requires a back office staff that requires regulation and regulators watching what they're doing. These are systems that help prevent a lot of fraud from happening in the first place, right? Prevent somebody from selling the same object twice or spending the same dollar twice. And in doing that can help make trustworthy systems and auditable systems much less expensive for many of these banks. So they can do a lot of what they do today just faster and cheaper and with greater guarantees that the parties that they're working with will make good on their commitments. I think the question is less about the pipes and the mechanisms but whether the notion of money and currency is fundamentally changing. So will my children, will they think that in order for their money to be secure, in order for them to trade and exchange and have savings accounts, there is even the need and existence of a bank. That I think is the more interesting question versus whether the Blockchain is going to get rid of the banks. I think the Blockchain then becomes the technology in the tool that enables that sort of transformation in the relationship to value. While few banks are likely to endorse the exchange of digital currencies, many are waking up to the possibilities of Blockchain. And it bears repeating that this technology was first designed to support an alternative store of value which principally as a system removed the need for third parties like banks. If you see an erosion of trust, say in financial institutions or banks, how does that create some kind of vacuum that then gives the space for alternatives to rise up where people become more receptive to placing, taking a risk in something new, placing their faith in something new. And there I think there is very much a direct correlation that there was this trust vacuum and these cryptocurrencies rose up and people were more open to an alternative financial system. I think whether we're talking about cryptocurrencies or we're talking about the underlying technology of Blockchain technology, it really is about trust. I could give you any example where you could deploy a Blockchain and you would say, couldn't you do that with a centralized system? Wouldn't it be faster? Wouldn't it be cheaper? And the answer is always yes. It will always be faster and cheaper to do something centralized. But we don't do that because we don't want to have to trust that entity at the center. Bitcoin would work tremendously well if there was just a Bitcoin bank and all of us had accounts in and out. But the whole point of doing a cryptocurrency like that is to decentralize that. So this is a protocol for re-establishing trust in digital systems. We're at a moment where people are losing trust. Trust in institutions, trust in government, trust in whole professions like banking and lawyers and such. And we need our technologies to help give us a bit of that back. Give us what we had when we knew the people that we did business with face to face. For a very long period of history, we have largely been dependent on institutional trust. Trust flows upwards to experts and regulators and CEOs and political leaders. And the trust really flows through institutions. And what we're starting to see now is, of course, I'm not saying institutions aren't important, but the trust is starting to flow sideways to strangers and peers and to colleagues and even to anonymous spots. And what worries me about that is then we become in this very dangerous cycle of who is responsible and where does accountability lie. So a lot can go wrong because often individuals don't realize the responsibility they're taking on in this age of distributed trust. Where does that leave us? Are we in the early days of the internet left to one day wonder how we ever lived without these technologies? Or will the hype around blockchain prove to be a bubble in and of itself? You know, amongst the evangelicals, you hear cryptocurrency is going to change everything in the world. And then you hear from skeptics, you know, they think it's going to change nothing. All of this is just a bubble. And I think the truth must be in the middle somewhere. In some ways it feels like 1995 in the early days of the internet where the first bits and pieces were coming together, where the first websites were launching, people were realizing while we could conduct commerce online we can build communities online. And lots of excitement, lots of experiments being conducted. But still some key architectural pieces that were still in the very early days and needed to be solidified such as the security of the connection between a website and your browser so that you could send a credit card number and know that it wasn't going to be listened to by everybody in between. And so we're somewhat early days although there are production deployments now of lots of blockchain technologies, real companies, realizing value from the application of this technology. But still early in terms of the market's understanding of it and in terms of how companies are comprehending. There's a lot of excitement. And I think we're in a time where these kinds of cycles get so compressed compared to 20 years ago that this duality is pretty understandable. It needs a whole new kind of social safety net. So I think this is, you know, people worry about the future of work. They worry about independent contractors on platforms. So if you don't have the institution as the default and you don't have mechanisms like health insurance and disability leave and parental leave, whatever it is, what is that new social safety net underneath the distributed network? But the real issue, like whatever the manifestation is the real issue is an issue of accountability.