Chamath Palihapitiya on Bitcoin CEO of Social Capital

The Bitcoin economy, while still in its infancy, is about $2 billion (meaning, the value of all Bitcoins) and rising. New services appear daily -- exchanges, digital wallets, payment processors, along with companies that accept Bitcoin alongside dollars, euros and yen for traditional services. In addition, a small and growing group of technologists are getting behind the currency, allocating time and capital to building a robust ecosystem.....

The opportunity here is to think constructively about a world in which money flows are more transparent (Bitcoin), easy (Bitcoin), cheap (Bitcoin) and secure (Bitcoin). Does the Bitcoin economy need regulation? Possibly. Much like virtual guardrails enabled the Internet to thrive, the Bitcoin ecosystem may need something similar to begin rebalancing the financial services landscape.....

The current price of Bitcoin is about $130. Some people think that Bitcoin will never become a useful currency but rather a better version of gold or a replacement to gold entirely (Gold 2.0). If this is all Bitcoin becomes, a good question is: "What would that make each Bitcoin worth?" Well, the value of all of the gold in the world is roughly $8 trillion. Assuming that Bitcoin can replace gold as a more useful store of value, then the upper bound of each Bitcoin would be almost $400,000 ($8 trillion/21 million bitcoins).

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