After PayPal I never thought I would get interested in payments again. But bitcoin is fulfilling PayPal’s original vision to create “the new world currency.” We actually had T-shirts printed in 1999 with that mission statement.
A payment is just a credit to one account and a debit to another. That’s a database entry. We believed that, if we could get enough people to participate, money would never need to leave the system. PayPal could become the database of money.
We added features like interest and debit cards so you’d never have to withdraw funds to the legacy banking system. When we got acquired by eBay, that project kind of stopped.
But cryptocurrencies like bitcoin are now fulfilling that original vision. They are doing it in a decentralized way (with a decentralized database called the blockchain) whereas PayPal tried to do it in a centralized way.
