Austin Craig

“One of the most surreal aspects of the NSA stories based on the Snowden documents is how they made even the most paranoid conspiracy theorists seem like paragons of reason and common sense.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“If you read anything about bitcoin, you’ll see the very same things that they said about the internet in the early '90s. It is a haven for pedophiles, terrorists, drug dealers, and criminals. How many of you in this room have bitcoin? How many of you in this room are terrorists, pedophiles, drug dealers or criminals? Audience laughs You see the thing about bitcoin is while they push this story, every now and then someone who has never heard of bitcoin notices an important thing: it’s still not dead, which is always surprising because every two or three months there is an article that says it’s dead. That’s great marketing. Because every time someone hears it’s dead and three months later they hear it’s still not dead, they think, "Huh, this thing really tends to survive." I call bitcoin "the internet of money,” but perhaps we should call it “the zombie of currencies.” It is the currency that is the undead. The”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, The Internet of Money

“At the end of the day, bitcoin is programmable money. When you have programmable money, the possibilities are truly endless. We can take many of the basic concepts of the current system that depend on legal contracts, and we can convert these into algorithmic contracts, into mathematical transactions that can be enforced on the bitcoin network. As I’ve said, there is no third party, there is no counterparty. If I choose to send value from one part of the network to another, it is peer-to-peer with no one in between. If I invent a new form of money, I can deploy it to the entire world and invite others to come and join me. Bitcoin is not just money for the internet. Yes, it’s perfect money for the internet. It’s instant, it’s safe, it’s free. Yes, it is money for the internet, but it’s so much more. Bitcoin is the internet of money. Currency is only the first application. If you grasp that, you can look beyond the price, you can look beyond the volatility, you can look beyond the fad. At its core, bitcoin is a revolutionary technology that will change the world forever. Join”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, The Internet of Money

“Sometimes I speak to various regional banks, the ones that are not afraid of bitcoin. They tell me things like 80 percent of our population is a hundred miles from the nearest bank branch and we can’t serve them. In one case, they said a hundred miles by canoe. I’ll let you guess which country that was. Yet, even in the remotest places on Earth, now there is a cell-phone tower. Even in the poorest places on Earth, we often see a little solar panel on a little hut that feeds a Nokia 1000 phone, the most produced device in the history of manufacturing, billions of them have shipped. We can turn every one of those into, not a bank account, but a bank. Two weeks ago, President Obama at South by Southwest did a presentation and he talked about our privacy. He said, ”If we can’t unlock the phones, that means that everyone has a Swiss bank account in their pocket." That is not entirely accurate. I don’t have a Swiss bank account in my pocket. I have a Swiss bank, with the ability to generate 2 billion addresses off a single seed and use a different address for every transaction. That bank is completely encrypted, so even if you do unlock the phone, I still have access to my bank. That represents the cognitive dissonance between the powers of centralized secrecy and the power of privacy as a human right that we now have within our grasp. If you think this is going to be easy or that it’s going to be without struggle, you’re very mistaken.”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, The Internet of Money