22 Jan 2014 / Bloomberg – Entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley to Wall Street say they don’t care much for Bitcoin as a currency to supplant the U.S. dollar. As a payment technology they could use to undercut Visa Inc. (V), Western Union Co. (WU) or Citigroup Inc. (C), they say they like it a lot more.
As Bitcoin’s value gyrates, these investors have said that the headlines about its price and chatter about which retailers accept it obscure the real merit of what Satoshi Nakamoto, the name given to the anonymous person or people who created Bitcoin, delivered five years ago.
“At some point, I had an ‘aha!’ moment and realized that Bitcoin was best understood as a new software protocol through which you could rebuild the payments industry in ways that are better and cheaper,” Chris Dixon, a partner at Menlo Park, California-based venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, wrote in a blog post.
Bitcoin enthusiasts say they are building a system to move money across the Internet securely and at a lower cost than existing wire transfers, bank debits or remittances. If they can eliminate the friction created by middlemen and create easy-to-use consumer tools, Bitcoin businesses may claim a piece of the revenue and still deliver lower costs….. Read more
