The blockchain that Andreessen just mentioned is what Susan Athey was describing earlier as a “public ledger.” It is a log of all transactions in the Bitcoin ecosystem. Every time you log in, you will have to input a code from your phone. Things are getting more interesting in Binance Futures as the platform has introduced a chatbot that will encourage its traders to share their experiences. Now, if you’re not a fan of computer science, this might get a little bit less interesting before it gets more interesting, but hang in there. Now, banks and other financial institutions already have ledgers of their own, which let them transfer funds internally or with other trusted parties. What they do is essentially transfer IOUs back and forth to make sure that digital money is not spent twice. ANDREESSEN: Money where my mouth is. ANDREESSEN: Twitter, Pinterest, you know, a very large number of the mobile apps people use all the time. And I didn’t transfer it to three other people at the same time, I didn’t lie about the fact that I transferred it. You can access this account from anywhere to transfer money without any hassle. Additionally, indicate your source of funds, your relationship with the recipient, and the purpose of the transfer.

Additionally, Bitcoin is simpler to purchase than some altcoins. And so Bitcoin basically holds out the promise of being the first solution to establishing trust over an untrusted network. ANDREESSEN: At the core of what Bitcoin is the solution to a fundamental problem in computer science that’s been around for decades that had never been solved before… That’s Susan Athey. She’s an economist at Stanford – she also studied computer science – and she’s an adviser to Ripple, another virtual currency, which is a Bitcoin rival. Andreessen’s firm has invested about $50 million in two Bitcoin-related companies, one of which is Coinbase, 바이낸스 2FA a Bitcoin exchange and transaction service that is a rival to the now-defunct Mt. Gox. Instead, if I make a transaction over the virtual currency, it’s just an entry in the ledger. And that public ledger is maintained by a set of computers all talking to each other using a protocol. ATHEY: The beauty of a new currency, which is part of a virtual currency protocol, is that what I’m moving from me to you is just an entry on a secure, public ledger. ATHEY: I think of Bitcoin as really a revolutionary new technology that is in some ways way past due.

ATHEY: But in the financial world we’re still basically running the system on decades-old technology… E-commerce we do a lot, and lots of other categories of technology. There’s already a huge e-commerce infrastructure – isn’t this what banks and credit card companies already do? Experts caution, too, that US officials need to find a balance between regulations that are too strict, which could have the effect of driving companies outside of the US, and providing a clearer framework for crypto to operate under that protects customers. ANDREESSEN: The metaphor basically is you have a group of generals in the Byzantine Empire and they’ve surrounded a huge city. And so this idea of the Byzantine Generals Problem turns out to apply directly to the Internet as a whole. So what’s really revolutionary I think about the whole math-based currency movement is that people have figured out a way that I can send an item of value from one entity to another entity securely, almost instantly, and without a middleman.

And so the question is how do you coordinate a significant number of people who don’t know each other and don’t trust each other being able to communicate securely and be able to basically establish digital trust? I’ve been using the Internet for years to pay people online, to carry out all kinds of transactions. One of the things as a consequence that’s been missing on the Internet for 20 years is kind of a native concept of money, right? And that’s kind of the magic to the system. ANDREESSEN: Yeah, that’s right, a group of colleagues and I built Mosaic, which was sort of the first widely used web browser in the early ’90s and then later founded a company called Netscape that basically built commercial versions. DUBNER: OK, and before that, and before that, and before that, you were doing things like helping build the first browser that a lot of us who got on the Internet when it was new started to use, Netscape Navigator. When it comes to naming the best Bitcoin brokers to open a trading account, a lot of names come.