By Matylda Czarnecka

Jim Robinson has been watching bitcoin closely, investing in several startups in the space including itBit, BitPay and most recently Chain. During his visit to IWNY, he clarified Bitcoin vs bitcoin, explained how it can disrupt more than money, and described the parallels he sees between its current state and the early days of the Internet.

Bitcoin’s value has seen deep valleys, but Robinson said he isn’t concerned.

“We measure these things in part by days and months in the news cycle, when they actually unfold in weeks, quarters and even years, so the technological development that is the block chain has continued unabated.”

The block chain is what earns a capital letter in Bitcoin. It’s a shared ledger system that creates a permanent record. “I’ve sent it, you received it, we know those two things happened, we know they’re both true, they’ve been vetted by the rest of the community, miners as we call them, so it’s there forever on the permanent record. That is a huge breakthrough,” he said. Lowercase bitcoin refers to the currency.

But Bitcoin’s potential isn’t limited to financial transactions, and Robinson believes that in the next few decades, we’ll be buying and selling homes, cars and deeds through Bitcoin. “Today, odds are your title [to your home] is in a drawer somewhere, maybe in a safe; in tomorrow’s world it’s electronic,” he said.

“We think in two dimensions in terms of money: You either have it or you don’t, you either keep it or you don’t, you keep it here or you keep it there, Robinson said, “whereas when you think about a token system, it can do a lot more than that.”

An example could be email providers charging a very tiny amount of bitcoin — say 1/10000th — per sent email. It might amount to an insignificant two pennies per month for each user but make email a suddenly expensive proposition to spammers who send billions of emails a month.

Security concerns don’t faze him either. “Yes, bad actors will materialize as they always do. Mt. Gox to me was more just an issue of no-one minding the store.” he said. “I view those hiccups as important ones in teaching a new generation how to build right.” He pointed out that current systems are not immune to security threats. “ If anything, in a digital world you’re going to have more transparency and sunshine even if there’s a pseudonymity implied in any given transaction,” he said.

Robinson likens current conversations around Bitcoin to ones he remembers from about the early days of the Internet in the early 90s.

“Like the Internet in the early days, you did have you unfortunate happenings, but you can’t deny the overall value to society of faster money that is cheaper.”

Of course, it will take time for Bitcoin to be fully integrated into the market, but Robinson believes it will be sooner than we think.

“Usually in technology we underestimate the ultimate impact of new,

important technologies and we greatly overestimate how fast they’ll happen.”

Watch the full interview: