Former Goldman Sachs partner and current Fortress Investment Group CIO Michael Novogratz says the smartest guys in the room have all turned their attention to Bitcoin.

In an interview Monday with Bloomberg Television at the 2014 Sohn investing conference, Novogratz explained how Bitcoin has grown to capture the imaginations of programmers from its libertarian roots:


There are in best estimates somewhere 30,000 individual programmers working on Bitcoin. My college roommate lives down in Barbados. He was the smartest guy that we went to school with [Novogratz graduated from Princeton - ed.]. He full time works on derivatives of Bitcoin. So there's this open source community where there's huge brain power, let alone all the VC money that's going in. And so from Marc Andreessen and his company to Benchmark… there's lots of smart money going in. I've never seen a small project with more human capital going into it, and so I kind of want to bet just on that alone."Fortress is sitting on $13 million-worth of Bitcoin. In February, the firm became the first publicly-traded company to file Bitcoin holdings (they were listed as losses).

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