7 ms·

Venture Capitalist Tim Draper Wins Bitcoin Auction

204 points by secondForty 12y ago

skizm 12y ago
Anyone see for how much?
- mkngrm 12y ago
  No exact figures have been released, but based on other bidder's input, the assumptions are that his bid was well over the market price.
  - phantom784 12y ago
    I'm surprised. What would be the reason to pay more than the market rate to get these coins?
    - octo_t 12y ago
      getting a large block of bitcoins without crashing the price.
      - mapleoin 12y ago
        You mean inflating, not crashing.
      - viraptor 12y ago
        Did you mean without elevating the price? If you're buying a large quantity you'd fill the sell orders from the lowest price, going up. Or did you mean something else?
    - pmorici 12y ago
      If he had bought that many on the open market it would have driven the price up by a large amount. Just go look at the current order book on Bitstamp.net one of the major exchanges. There are only about 5k coins on offer and many of those are for prices well above market. https://www.bitstamp.net/market/order_book/ https://www.bitstamp.net/market/order_book/
      - hueving 12y ago
        That's a terrible indicator. Unless the guy was a complete moron, he wouldn't just submit an order to the market to buy 30k coins at the market price. It would be trickled over the process of a couple of weeks. By your same logic, the coins he bought are hardly worth anything because if he tried to sell them it would just crash the price. There is only about 5k worth of buy orders in the book at the moment. In fact, if he paid above market price, it would be in his interest to make sure the number got 'leaked' to encourage rampant speculation to drive up the price beyond what he paid.
        pmorici 12y ago
        Yeah, that's the point. You would have to go through a lot of work slowly buying coins over several weeks to get to 30k and even then it would affect the price. So it makes sense to bid a little high and get them all in one go.
        hueving 12y ago
        What 'work'? It would be trivial to just keep setting small orders until you reach your target. With how volatile bitcoin is there is no reason to chase the price up.
      - haakon 12y ago
        They don't seem to show their whole order book on that page. If you look at the cumulative depth chart at http://bitcoinity.org/markets/bitstamp/USD http://bitcoinity.org/markets/bitstamp/USD, it currently shows over 12K BTC asks. Buying all that in one fell swoop would drive the price to over $4000 though.
    - psychometry 12y ago
      Read the article. >Vaurum has launched trading platforms in emerging markets, and we will be partnering with Tim to leverage the pool of 30,000 bitcoins as a liquidity source
    - n6mac41717 12y ago
      There are several reasons including: 1. He doesn't want to put $2M in any exchange or spread out over multiple exchanges to buy a large amount. 2. There is no cleaner accounting than to buy 30k in one swoop and from the USMS. 3. For very little risk, he either gets it or he doesn't.
  - dustcoin 12y ago
    The bidders who announced they did not win specified bids in the $400-$500 range. Draper likely won with a higher, but still below market, bid.
    - mkngrm 12y ago
      There were also bidders who put in bids much lower than that, how does that mean he wasn't above market? Do you have a link to those other bidders' claims?
      - gibybo 12y ago
        Because there is no losing bidder who claimed a near market price bid. All publicly claimed bids were far below market.
        mkngrm 12y ago
        Until you have every losing bid, you can't make these claims. Can't reply, so I'll add it to this comment. As stated by others, the only way to purchase a large amount of bitcoins without jacking up the price is to do it in one large sum. By bidding over market price, he ensured that he would get this chunk of 30k coins without affecting the market.
        canvia 12y ago
        But you can claim that it was well over market price? How does that work?
        mbillie1 12y ago
        > No exact figures have been released, but based on other bidder's input, the assumptions are that his bid was well over the market price. So how is this justified?
        Phlarp 12y ago
        If this many bitcoins were purchased in a short time frame on the exchanges the price would shoot well over 1000 almost instantly.
  - rational-future 12y ago
    What is the market price?
    - mkngrm 12y ago
      Right around $650 right now. http://bitcoinity.org/markets http://bitcoinity.org/markets
      - LeoPanthera 12y ago
        I prefer this site: https://bitcoinaverage.com/#USD https://bitcoinaverage.com/#USD It takes into account multiple exchanges, not just one.
lowlevel 12y ago
Regardless, he managed to buy without driving the market price up too much.
- dave_sullivan 12y ago
  No, he didn't buy it on the open market as this was essentially a private transaction between two parties. What it means is there's now someone trying to sell (instead of hoard) bitcoins worth $what_he_paid_for_it + %target_return. That will have an effect on the price, but he's not going to dump them and drive the price down because he paid a lot for them and wants to make a return (unless there's some kind of panic in bitcoin and he just says screw it). Kind of interesting actually. At the very least, bitcoin is going to be a data driven economists wet dream for years to come.
  - danielweber 12y ago
    Do we know his plan to sell them? It's what I would do, but has he stated his intent?
    - jackgavigan 12y ago
      Well, in TFA, it's pretty clear that he plans to team up with Vaurum "to provide Bitcoin liquidity to emerging markets." So, it sounds like he may end up selling them to other people but only as part of a broader strategy to (and I'm guessing here) make it easier to transfer money to and from emerging markets. If that's what he's doing (and bear in mind I'm just guessing here) it's a very ambitious goal. I used to trade emerging market equity swaps (which involved hedging FX exposure) and I've worked on international, cross-currency payments systems for one of the biggest banks in the UK. You need to know what you're doing when you're playing around in the FX space. You really need to know what you're doing when you're dealing in emerging markets currencies. I once lost $16,000 in the space of twenty seconds because I made a single, simple mistake.
      - voltagex_ 12y ago
        I've always wondered - what do you do when you lose that much money? What happens next?
chollida1 12y ago
Wow, looking at the order book of bitstamp [1] through the eyes of someone who lives in the world of market microstructure is eye opening:) There are huge holes everywhere in the order book and the liquidity at each offering level seems to be completely without reason. I just spent 20 minutes applying the sort of algorithms that'd we'd normally run on each stock to make markets in it and it can't detect any real patterns or justification for the bid/ask levels. Is this just a case of everyone in the bitcoin market being "unsophisticated" in the quantitative sense? or is there some new form of market micro structure being created here? Thoughts?? EDIT For people asking about what you'd expect to see: 1) After the initial price level, you'd generally expect the next 10 or so price levels to be pretty tight. In the bitcoin case some of the spreads between price levels are larger than the bid/ask spread. The price levels don't appear to have any logical basis behind why they are placed where they are. 2) volume at each price level. Similarly to above the volume at each price level doesn't appear to have any discernible pattern. Typically volumes would increase at each price level, up to a point, as more people join the market at each price level. They don't break out a level 3 quote( order book by order, as opposed to price) so you can't really see how many orders are backing up each price level but given how small the volume of many of the price level are you can probably assume its only one person/order at most levels. [1] https://www.bitstamp.net/market/order_book/ https://www.bitstamp.net/market/order_book/
- ewillbefull 12y ago
  There are a lot of amateur day traders in the bitcoin community who just wing it. I'd say weird patterns you find are probably because of that.
- computer 12y ago
  I think one reason is that many people in the bitcoin market are unsophisticated compared to your normal market traders. But also, Bitcoin is an asset all by itself. You can't hedge it against other assets, like you can do with corn or tech. You can't easily short it. So, there's no "true" reasonable price range like with most assets, and no normal influences on the price. It's basically truly a bubble of hot air everybody is bidding on, except with the hope that the bubble will never burst, and be used as currency.
test1235 12y ago
Where does the money actually go after the sale is complete?
- mrb 12y ago
  "Proceeds generated from asset sales are used to operate the AFP, compensate victims, supplement funding for law enforcement initiatives and support community programs." http://www.usmarshals.gov/duties/factsheets/asset_forfeiture-2014.pdf http://www.usmarshals.gov/duties/factsheets/asset_forfeiture...
jordanmessina 12y ago
The Drapers are quite bullish on Bitcoin. Adam Draper's accelerator, Boost VC, is investing in 100 Bitcoin companies over the next 3 years: http://www.coindesk.com/boost-vc-accelerate-100-bitcoin-companies-next-three-years/ http://www.coindesk.com/boost-vc-accelerate-100-bitcoin-comp...
- bredren 12y ago
  Rob from Gliph here. Gliph is a Bitcoin company from Boost VC Class 2. Tim Draper led our angel round (with Pantera) and is a mentor to Gliph. Tim has been excited about Bitcoin and its potential for some time. Well in advance of other VCs, Tim was talking about its potential, particularly with regard to "competitive governance." Have a look at this youtube video from his presentation at Stanford in February of last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZ0mrD0EnI0#t=28m05s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZ0mrD0EnI0#t=28m05s He starts describing solutions for competitive governance around 28:05. At 29:10 he brings up Bitcoin. I believe this was the first time he spoke about Bitcoin publicly but may be wrong. He states in the video: "[bitcoin is] the most valuable currency now on the planet because it is under no one's control. It is out of people's control. It is no longer regulated by any government. They can't print Bitcoin." Bitcoin was worth about $24.50 when he said that.
  - roymurdock 12y ago
    The developers and miners are, in effect, the government of bitcoin. The developers act like the federal reserve, in that they can change the code to raise the max amount of bitcoin, increase the mining difficulty, etc. just as the Federal reserve would conduct open market operations or set interest rates to target inflation. So it's completely wrong to say that Bitcoin is "under no one's control". [0] The key difference is that a majority of the miners have to accept the developer's changes and run the new client. The average US citizen cannot refuse interest rate hikes. So it's a transfer of power away from the few and corrupt (Fed + banks) to the few who are limited in their ability to be corrupt (developers + mining pools). If the developers implement a terrible policy, the miners will refuse to update their clients to avoid devaluing the currency they are working hard to generate. So the power distribution and incentive structure are different. Whether thats a good or bad thing remains to be seen. [0] http://www.weis2013.econinfosec.org/papers/KrollDaveyFeltenWEIS2013.pdf http://www.weis2013.econinfosec.org/papers/KrollDaveyFeltenW...
goodcanadian 12y ago
From the article: “Bitcoin frees people from trying to operate in a modern market economy with weak currencies. With the help of Vaurum and this newly purchased bitcoin, we expect to be able to create new services that can provide liquidity and confidence to markets that have been hamstrung by weak currencies” The issue that I take with this statement is that so far, bitcoin is far from a strong stable currency. I reserve judgment on whether it will ever get there, but I am not convinced that doing business in bitcoin is currently safer than doing it in Indonesian rupiah (for example).
- ianpurton 12y ago
  Citizens in countries with high inflation could piossible benefit.
BorisMelnik 12y ago
anyone have any clue what some of the highest bids were?
- r0m4n0 12y ago
  It's interesting that they didn't communicate the amount and I haven't found any sources that provide one. You would think there would be more transparency seeing that the money is going into the government's pocket. Someone should submit a freedom of information request...
  - n6mac41717 12y ago
    The FAQ (http://www.usmarshals.gov/assets/2014/bitcoins/faqs.pdf http://www.usmarshals.gov/assets/2014/bitcoins/faqs.pdf) specifically says they will not disclose. I guess if someone really wants the information, they will challenge this intention. I find it interesting that it was leaked that 1 party won the bid--that seems in contradiction to the above...
mandeepj 12y ago
how it is different to mine your own bitcoins rather than buying from market? Who decides and based upon what factors - how many coins you can mine?
- arg01 12y ago
  To simplify: Bitcoin miners race to discover a code that gives them 50 bitcoins. This code gets harder to find each time it is found. This decision is pre-baked in using the bitcoin system (other e-currencies have different traits.) If you join a mining pool then you split the 50 coins with everyone else in the pool (and they'll split with you) if you are the lucky machine than found the code. The analogy is pretty direct: mining is the same as going and doing work to dig up gold, buying from the market is the same as buying gold in the market.
  - jc123 12y ago
    The current coinbase reward is 25, not 50, bitcoins. Halves every 4 years.
- jc123 12y ago
  Mining bitcoins is a hardware arms race that will be very hard for new entrants to join unless they are willing to spend a lot.
robertlf 12y ago
Yup, the rich get richer.
- oafitupa 12y ago
  Everyone can get richer now thanks to Bitcoin. Not rich? Doesn't matter, just buy $10, $100, or whatever you can spare.
davycro 12y ago
Mr Draper states that Bitcoin is badly needed in resource-poor countries with unstable currencies. How does he expect Bitcoin to compete with mobile currencies such as M-Pesa? Thinking about it, I imagine that the advantage of Bitcoin is that it can be sent globally, whereas M-Pesa type currencies are restricted to specific countries.
- logicchains 12y ago
  It's also harder to tax Bitcoin transactions than M-Pesa transactions, which could provide financial incentive to use it.
- defo_nonconvex 12y ago
  Isn't M-pesa backed using the country's currency? What logic of what you're saying sounds like it could imply that "Paypal is it's own virtual currency"...
tomlongson 12y ago
Building on the momentum of mainstream adoption and giving access to emerging markets, GogoCoin (500 Startups) is working to get Bitcoin and digital cash into everyone's hands. I applaud Tim Draper and all the other notable bidders who help push Bitcoin one step closer to Wall Street and the mass market.
fdsary 12y ago
So there was a press conference about this. It was streamed somewhere. If anyone has a torrent of the video I'd love it's url! Thank you very much

204 points by secondForty 12y ago

skizm 12y ago

Anyone see for how much?

mkngrm 12y ago
No exact figures have been released, but based on other bidder's input, the assumptions are that his bid was well over the market price.
- phantom784 12y ago
  I'm surprised. What would be the reason to pay more than the market rate to get these coins?
  - octo_t 12y ago
    getting a large block of bitcoins without crashing the price.
    - mapleoin 12y ago
      You mean inflating, not crashing.
    - viraptor 12y ago
      Did you mean without elevating the price? If you're buying a large quantity you'd fill the sell orders from the lowest price, going up. Or did you mean something else?
  - pmorici 12y ago
    If he had bought that many on the open market it would have driven the price up by a large amount. Just go look at the current order book on Bitstamp.net one of the major exchanges. There are only about 5k coins on offer and many of those are for prices well above market. https://www.bitstamp.net/market/order_book/ https://www.bitstamp.net/market/order_book/
    - hueving 12y ago
      That's a terrible indicator. Unless the guy was a complete moron, he wouldn't just submit an order to the market to buy 30k coins at the market price. It would be trickled over the process of a couple of weeks. By your same logic, the coins he bought are hardly worth anything because if he tried to sell them it would just crash the price. There is only about 5k worth of buy orders in the book at the moment. In fact, if he paid above market price, it would be in his interest to make sure the number got 'leaked' to encourage rampant speculation to drive up the price beyond what he paid.
      - pmorici 12y ago
        Yeah, that's the point. You would have to go through a lot of work slowly buying coins over several weeks to get to 30k and even then it would affect the price. So it makes sense to bid a little high and get them all in one go.
        hueving 12y ago
        What 'work'? It would be trivial to just keep setting small orders until you reach your target. With how volatile bitcoin is there is no reason to chase the price up.
    - haakon 12y ago
      They don't seem to show their whole order book on that page. If you look at the cumulative depth chart at http://bitcoinity.org/markets/bitstamp/USD http://bitcoinity.org/markets/bitstamp/USD, it currently shows over 12K BTC asks. Buying all that in one fell swoop would drive the price to over $4000 though.
  - psychometry 12y ago
    Read the article. >Vaurum has launched trading platforms in emerging markets, and we will be partnering with Tim to leverage the pool of 30,000 bitcoins as a liquidity source
  - n6mac41717 12y ago
    There are several reasons including: 1. He doesn't want to put $2M in any exchange or spread out over multiple exchanges to buy a large amount. 2. There is no cleaner accounting than to buy 30k in one swoop and from the USMS. 3. For very little risk, he either gets it or he doesn't.
- dustcoin 12y ago
  The bidders who announced they did not win specified bids in the $400-$500 range. Draper likely won with a higher, but still below market, bid.
  - mkngrm 12y ago
    There were also bidders who put in bids much lower than that, how does that mean he wasn't above market? Do you have a link to those other bidders' claims?
    - gibybo 12y ago
      Because there is no losing bidder who claimed a near market price bid. All publicly claimed bids were far below market.
      - mkngrm 12y ago
        Until you have every losing bid, you can't make these claims. Can't reply, so I'll add it to this comment. As stated by others, the only way to purchase a large amount of bitcoins without jacking up the price is to do it in one large sum. By bidding over market price, he ensured that he would get this chunk of 30k coins without affecting the market.
        canvia 12y ago
        But you can claim that it was well over market price? How does that work?
        mbillie1 12y ago
        > No exact figures have been released, but based on other bidder's input, the assumptions are that his bid was well over the market price. So how is this justified?
        Phlarp 12y ago
        If this many bitcoins were purchased in a short time frame on the exchanges the price would shoot well over 1000 almost instantly.
- rational-future 12y ago
  What is the market price?
  - mkngrm 12y ago
    Right around $650 right now. http://bitcoinity.org/markets http://bitcoinity.org/markets
    - LeoPanthera 12y ago
      I prefer this site: https://bitcoinaverage.com/#USD https://bitcoinaverage.com/#USD It takes into account multiple exchanges, not just one.

lowlevel 12y ago

Regardless, he managed to buy without driving the market price up too much.

dave_sullivan 12y ago
No, he didn't buy it on the open market as this was essentially a private transaction between two parties. What it means is there's now someone trying to sell (instead of hoard) bitcoins worth $what_he_paid_for_it + %target_return. That will have an effect on the price, but he's not going to dump them and drive the price down because he paid a lot for them and wants to make a return (unless there's some kind of panic in bitcoin and he just says screw it). Kind of interesting actually. At the very least, bitcoin is going to be a data driven economists wet dream for years to come.
- danielweber 12y ago
  Do we know his plan to sell them? It's what I would do, but has he stated his intent?
  - jackgavigan 12y ago
    Well, in TFA, it's pretty clear that he plans to team up with Vaurum "to provide Bitcoin liquidity to emerging markets." So, it sounds like he may end up selling them to other people but only as part of a broader strategy to (and I'm guessing here) make it easier to transfer money to and from emerging markets. If that's what he's doing (and bear in mind I'm just guessing here) it's a very ambitious goal. I used to trade emerging market equity swaps (which involved hedging FX exposure) and I've worked on international, cross-currency payments systems for one of the biggest banks in the UK. You need to know what you're doing when you're playing around in the FX space. You really need to know what you're doing when you're dealing in emerging markets currencies. I once lost $16,000 in the space of twenty seconds because I made a single, simple mistake.
    - voltagex_ 12y ago
      I've always wondered - what do you do when you lose that much money? What happens next?

chollida1 12y ago

Wow, looking at the order book of bitstamp [1] through the eyes of someone who lives in the world of market microstructure is eye opening:) There are huge holes everywhere in the order book and the liquidity at each offering level seems to be completely without reason. I just spent 20 minutes applying the sort of algorithms that'd we'd normally run on each stock to make markets in it and it can't detect any real patterns or justification for the bid/ask levels. Is this just a case of everyone in the bitcoin market being "unsophisticated" in the quantitative sense? or is there some new form of market micro structure being created here? Thoughts?? EDIT For people asking about what you'd expect to see: 1) After the initial price level, you'd generally expect the next 10 or so price levels to be pretty tight. In the bitcoin case some of the spreads between price levels are larger than the bid/ask spread. The price levels don't appear to have any logical basis behind why they are placed where they are. 2) volume at each price level. Similarly to above the volume at each price level doesn't appear to have any discernible pattern. Typically volumes would increase at each price level, up to a point, as more people join the market at each price level. They don't break out a level 3 quote( order book by order, as opposed to price) so you can't really see how many orders are backing up each price level but given how small the volume of many of the price level are you can probably assume its only one person/order at most levels. [1] https://www.bitstamp.net/market/order_book/ https://www.bitstamp.net/market/order_book/

ewillbefull 12y ago
There are a lot of amateur day traders in the bitcoin community who just wing it. I'd say weird patterns you find are probably because of that.
computer 12y ago
I think one reason is that many people in the bitcoin market are unsophisticated compared to your normal market traders. But also, Bitcoin is an asset all by itself. You can't hedge it against other assets, like you can do with corn or tech. You can't easily short it. So, there's no "true" reasonable price range like with most assets, and no normal influences on the price. It's basically truly a bubble of hot air everybody is bidding on, except with the hope that the bubble will never burst, and be used as currency.

test1235 12y ago

Where does the money actually go after the sale is complete?

mrb 12y ago
"Proceeds generated from asset sales are used to operate the AFP, compensate victims, supplement funding for law enforcement initiatives and support community programs." http://www.usmarshals.gov/duties/factsheets/asset_forfeiture-2014.pdf http://www.usmarshals.gov/duties/factsheets/asset_forfeiture...

jordanmessina 12y ago

The Drapers are quite bullish on Bitcoin. Adam Draper's accelerator, Boost VC, is investing in 100 Bitcoin companies over the next 3 years: http://www.coindesk.com/boost-vc-accelerate-100-bitcoin-companies-next-three-years/ http://www.coindesk.com/boost-vc-accelerate-100-bitcoin-comp...

bredren 12y ago
Rob from Gliph here. Gliph is a Bitcoin company from Boost VC Class 2. Tim Draper led our angel round (with Pantera) and is a mentor to Gliph. Tim has been excited about Bitcoin and its potential for some time. Well in advance of other VCs, Tim was talking about its potential, particularly with regard to "competitive governance." Have a look at this youtube video from his presentation at Stanford in February of last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZ0mrD0EnI0#t=28m05s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZ0mrD0EnI0#t=28m05s He starts describing solutions for competitive governance around 28:05. At 29:10 he brings up Bitcoin. I believe this was the first time he spoke about Bitcoin publicly but may be wrong. He states in the video: "[bitcoin is] the most valuable currency now on the planet because it is under no one's control. It is out of people's control. It is no longer regulated by any government. They can't print Bitcoin." Bitcoin was worth about $24.50 when he said that.
- roymurdock 12y ago
  The developers and miners are, in effect, the government of bitcoin. The developers act like the federal reserve, in that they can change the code to raise the max amount of bitcoin, increase the mining difficulty, etc. just as the Federal reserve would conduct open market operations or set interest rates to target inflation. So it's completely wrong to say that Bitcoin is "under no one's control". [0] The key difference is that a majority of the miners have to accept the developer's changes and run the new client. The average US citizen cannot refuse interest rate hikes. So it's a transfer of power away from the few and corrupt (Fed + banks) to the few who are limited in their ability to be corrupt (developers + mining pools). If the developers implement a terrible policy, the miners will refuse to update their clients to avoid devaluing the currency they are working hard to generate. So the power distribution and incentive structure are different. Whether thats a good or bad thing remains to be seen. [0] http://www.weis2013.econinfosec.org/papers/KrollDaveyFeltenWEIS2013.pdf http://www.weis2013.econinfosec.org/papers/KrollDaveyFeltenW...

goodcanadian 12y ago

From the article: “Bitcoin frees people from trying to operate in a modern market economy with weak currencies. With the help of Vaurum and this newly purchased bitcoin, we expect to be able to create new services that can provide liquidity and confidence to markets that have been hamstrung by weak currencies” The issue that I take with this statement is that so far, bitcoin is far from a strong stable currency. I reserve judgment on whether it will ever get there, but I am not convinced that doing business in bitcoin is currently safer than doing it in Indonesian rupiah (for example).

ianpurton 12y ago
Citizens in countries with high inflation could piossible benefit.

BorisMelnik 12y ago

anyone have any clue what some of the highest bids were?

r0m4n0 12y ago
It's interesting that they didn't communicate the amount and I haven't found any sources that provide one. You would think there would be more transparency seeing that the money is going into the government's pocket. Someone should submit a freedom of information request...
- n6mac41717 12y ago
  The FAQ (http://www.usmarshals.gov/assets/2014/bitcoins/faqs.pdf http://www.usmarshals.gov/assets/2014/bitcoins/faqs.pdf) specifically says they will not disclose. I guess if someone really wants the information, they will challenge this intention. I find it interesting that it was leaked that 1 party won the bid--that seems in contradiction to the above...

mandeepj 12y ago

how it is different to mine your own bitcoins rather than buying from market? Who decides and based upon what factors - how many coins you can mine?

arg01 12y ago
To simplify: Bitcoin miners race to discover a code that gives them 50 bitcoins. This code gets harder to find each time it is found. This decision is pre-baked in using the bitcoin system (other e-currencies have different traits.) If you join a mining pool then you split the 50 coins with everyone else in the pool (and they'll split with you) if you are the lucky machine than found the code. The analogy is pretty direct: mining is the same as going and doing work to dig up gold, buying from the market is the same as buying gold in the market.
- jc123 12y ago
  The current coinbase reward is 25, not 50, bitcoins. Halves every 4 years.
jc123 12y ago
Mining bitcoins is a hardware arms race that will be very hard for new entrants to join unless they are willing to spend a lot.

robertlf 12y ago

Yup, the rich get richer.

oafitupa 12y ago
Everyone can get richer now thanks to Bitcoin. Not rich? Doesn't matter, just buy $10, $100, or whatever you can spare.

davycro 12y ago

Mr Draper states that Bitcoin is badly needed in resource-poor countries with unstable currencies. How does he expect Bitcoin to compete with mobile currencies such as M-Pesa? Thinking about it, I imagine that the advantage of Bitcoin is that it can be sent globally, whereas M-Pesa type currencies are restricted to specific countries.

logicchains 12y ago
It's also harder to tax Bitcoin transactions than M-Pesa transactions, which could provide financial incentive to use it.
defo_nonconvex 12y ago
Isn't M-pesa backed using the country's currency? What logic of what you're saying sounds like it could imply that "Paypal is it's own virtual currency"...

tomlongson 12y ago

Building on the momentum of mainstream adoption and giving access to emerging markets, GogoCoin (500 Startups) is working to get Bitcoin and digital cash into everyone's hands. I applaud Tim Draper and all the other notable bidders who help push Bitcoin one step closer to Wall Street and the mass market.

fdsary 12y ago

So there was a press conference about this. It was streamed somewhere. If anyone has a torrent of the video I'd love it's url! Thank you very much