“Bitcoin, Crypto Will Replace Government Fiat Over Time”

Erik Voorhees, CEO of ShapeShift, recently sat down with Naomi Brockwell, a crypto-loving film/TV producer, in an exclusive interview regarding Bitcoin’s 10th anniversary and what’s next for this nascent industry.

Bitcoin celebrate its 10th anniversary this week! I chat to @ShapeShift_io CEO @ErikVoorhees about how far it’s come in the last 10 years and what the future might hold! https://t.co/G4K3G2pHIk pic.twitter.com/mC4Q5dhdta — Naomi Brrrrrockwell (@naomibrockwell) November 3, 2018

Opening the 45-minute long interview, which covered a diverse range of topics pertaining to Voorhees’ background and opinions on crypto assets, Brockwell asked the prominent ShapeShift executive to reminisce on how he first viewed this nascent industry. The ShapeShift CEO, who forayed in the cryptosphere in 2014, responded, first noting that he truly believed that crypto assets would see unprecedented growth from day one.

He elaborated, issuing the following inflammatory comment on the matter:

I’ve felt like it has always had a significant potential to take over the world… and I still do. I still think that it is going to replace government fiat over time, especially as people continue to figure out that there is an alternative to that scam.

Still, remaining cautiously optimistic, Voorhees noted that while crypto’s rise to worldwide dominance may be inevitable, it needs people, innovators, and startups to put in the elbow grease, so to speak. to make it happen. Keeping this in mind, speaking from a personal level, the Bitcoin pioneer then added that he has dedicated his whole life to build, maintain, and promote projects in this industry to bolster crypto’s adoption.

And so far, some would argue that cryptocurrencies are well on their way to the global stage. As put by Voorhees:

It has certainly come a helluva long way [since I started]. Every financial institution in the world is watching it. Every government is somewhat bothered and/or a little nervous about it. Tens of millions of people have used it and most people in the developed world have heard of this at this point. So yeah, it has made a huge progress, but there still is ways to go.

Voorhees’ strong comment on the relationship between fiat (government-issued currencies) and crypto asset comes just a week after Tim Draper, an American entrepreneur, made a similar claim, telling CNBC Africa’s Ran NeuNer that fiat, which Draper calls “political currency,” will have no use case in a few years/decades time.

“Crypto Poses An Existential Threat To Governments”

Discussing the topic of governmental involvement and regulation in crypto markets, Voorhees first pointed out that initially, he was very fearful that the U.S. government and other prominent authorities “would have been harsher on Bitcoin” due to the “existential threat” the blockchain-based asset posed to centralized systems.

Surprisingly, in direct contradiction to his fear that regulators would fight Bitcoin ‘tooth and nail’, Voorhees noted that they have been more tolerant than expected, which he attributed to authorities failing to realize the power that decentralized systems, like Bitcoin and other crypto assets, pose to the centralized world.

“Ultimately,” Voorhees added, “it has gone from a little niche project to something that a lot of normal, respectable people understand and talk about. And blockchain technology is becoming something that is [obviously] harder to vilify.”

A Printing Press Revolution

Commenting on this industry as a whole, Voorhees explained that decentralized technologies and crypto assets are “immensely powerful,” adding that the Bitcoin Revolution is as strong as the arrival of Gutenberg’s Printing Press or the Internet, which the ShapeShift chief evidently sees as two ground-breaking innovations in humanity’s relatively short history.

Moreover, the long-time cryptocurrency fanatic added that overall, crypto assets are a “huge benefit to humanity” due to the decentralized and efficient nature of some of these systems and networks.