23 Jan 2014 / Motherboard – It’s an open secret why Silicon Valley loves Bitcoin and it’s only a matter of time before the titans of tech start pushing around their influential weight—like Google, whose top engineers may have just let slip that they’re already in the game.
The explosion of innovation and capitalism out on the West Coast over the last two decades has been fueled by the proliferation of smaller and more powerful computers connected by an ever-expanding network, the internet of course.
Digital versions of mail and books shone a light on apparently archaic institutions like the postal service and the library while Jeff Bezos single-handedly made the shopping mall obsolete. Multiple tech bubbles and the businesses and services that emerged have forever transformed the way we eat, work, and play. But one industry remains indignantly undisrupted: finance.
Beyond PayPal—which was always more Western Union than Bank of America—the banking sector has been frustratingly impenetrable by techno-centric entrepreneurs in large part due to strict regulations, which represent inordinate barriers of entries for resourceful startups who would rather break things than play by the rules. Playing with money is the equivalent of playing with regulatory fire meaning that there’s never been an easy or obvious way to bootstrap your way into Wall Street.
At least until now: enter Bitcoin. Call it a currency or call it a commodity, it doesn’t really matter. In Silicon Valley, tech heavyweights see it as a backdoor into the world of finance.
Marc Andreessen, the man best known for making the web mainstream with the first widely used browser, Netscape, believes Bitcoin is the final missing puzzle piece, comparing the significance of the technology with the personal computer and the internet in an op-ed for the New York Times titled “Why Bitcoin Matters.”….. Read more
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/why-silicon-valley-and-google-loves-bitcoin
