Bitcoin

Why will Bitcoin accrue value in a way that Ethereum won’t? Because in addition to being a protocol, it is a product.

I would be long Bitcoin, and neutral to skeptical of just about everything else at this point with a few possible exceptions. There will be one online equivalent to gold, and the one you'd bet on would be the biggest.

In the crypto world, Bitcoin is perceived as slow to change, clunky technologically, and as having bad governance. While all these things may be true, Bitcoin has strong network effects that will maintain its status as the primary value store in the short to medium term.

Why has Bitcoin failed? It has failed because the community has failed. What was meant to be a new, decentralised form of money that lacked “systemically important institutions” and “too big to fail” has become something even worse: a system completely controlled by just a handful of people. Worse still, the network is on the brink of technical collapse.

Until the Bitcoin community ditches the cranks and adopts a sensible monetary policy that properly recognises both the need for savings to be intermediated into productive investment and the need for money to flow, Bitcoin cannot possibly operate as the anchor of the cryptocurrency ecosystem.

I don't have a view on what the ultimate value of a Bitcoin will be nor do I care. I am interested in Bitcoin plain and simply because I believe it can be and possibly will be the financial and transactional protocol for the global Internet.

The internet is going to be one of the major forces for reducing the role of government. The one thing that’s missing, but that will soon be developed, is a reliable e-cash: a method whereby on the internet you can transfer funds from A to B without A knowing B or B knowing A -- the way in which I can take a $20 bill and hand it over to you, and there's no record of where it came from.

Bitcoin is evil … So far almost all of the Bitcoin discussion has been positive economics — can this actually work? And I have to say that I’m still deeply unconvinced.

Bitcoin is a remarkable cryptographic achievement. The ability to create something which is not duplicable in the digital world has enormous value.

Bitcoin as a currency is working. There may be other currencies like it that may be even better. But in the meantime, there’s a big industry around Bitcoin. People have made fortunes off Bitcoin; some have lost money. It is volatile, but people make money off of volatility, too.

Bitcoin is exciting because it shows how cheap it can be. Bitcoin is better than currency in that you don’t have to be physically in the same place and, of course, for large transactions, currency can get pretty inconvenient.

Whether digital currencies will take off in a big way remains to be seen. But it is a phenomenon that many central banks are watching closely, including MAS. And if they do take off, one cannot rule out central banks themselves issuing digital currencies some day!

Given that the development of financial services has been supported by ledgers as the basic infrastructure for information, the dramatic changes in how ledgers are kept may have the potential of significantly changing the structure of financial services.

I'm a believer. ... I'm one of the few standing before you today from a large financial-services company that has not given up on digital currencies.

“Digital currencies are nothing but an unfounded fad (or perhaps even a pyramid scheme), based on a willingness to ascribe value to something that has little or none beyond what people will pay for it." They are "not real!!!!! Nobody has been able to make sense to me of these currencies.”