Marc Andreessen, the tech entrepreneur who rose to fame as one of the founders of Netscape, takes the latter view, going as far as to say that in 20 years we will be talking about bitcoin the way we now talk about the Internet.
In a candid
interview in the Washington Post, Andreessen shrugs off the prevalent definition of bitcoin as a digital currency. “
It’s a much deeper concept than currency. It’s the idea of distributed trust,” he says.
Andreessen says that had the concept of bitcoin been hatched 20 years ago, it would have been built into the browser. He views it as a foundation with potentially “hundreds or thousands of applications and companies that could get built on top.”
What type of applications or companies? “Digital stocks. Digital equities. Digital fundraising for companies. Digital bonds. Digital contracts, digital keys, digital title, who owns what–digital title to your house, to your car,” he says.
Andreessen argues that it has the potential to actually be a safer form of ecommerce than the credit card-based system that is currently in place.
“
It doesn’t make sense online to have a payment mechanism that requires you to hand over your credentials to make a payment,”
Andreessen says, “
That’s just an invitation to fraud and identity theft. It’s just stupid.“
Instead, Andreessen argues, ecommerce should have been built upon a distributed trust type system like what bitcoin offers.
“But we didn’t have the better way of doing it,” he says. “So we didn’t know what else to do, and now we have the better way of doing it. Now, it’s going to take time.“
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