Brad Templeton: How Bitcoin Disrupts the Finance Industry | Big Think

How Bitcoin Disrupts the Finance Industry

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Should you invest in Bitcoin? Maybe not, says Brad Templeton, but that doesn't mean the digital currency isn't amazing in and of itself. Templeton explains what Bitcoin achieves and how it's set to spur further innovation.

Brad Templeton is one of many ahead-of-the-curve speakers at 2015’s Exponential Finance conference, June 2-3 in New York City. Co-produced by Singularity University and CNBC, Exponential Finance provides insight into new technologies that leaders need to understand in order to make the most of the accelerating change happening across business sectors.

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BRAD TEMPLETON:

Brad Templeton is the Track Chair for Computing at Singularity University, developer of and commentator on self-driving cars, software architect, board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, internet entrepreneur, futurist lecturer, writer and observer of cyberspace issues, hobby photographer, and an artist.

Templeton has been a consultant on Google’s team designing a driverless car and lectures and blogs about the emerging technology of automated transportation. He is also noted as a speaker and writer covering copyright law and political and social issues related to computing and networks. He is a director of the futurist Foresight Nanotech Institute, a think tank and public interest organization focused on transformative future technologies.

Templeton was founder, publisher and software architect at ClariNet Communications Corp., which in the 1990s became the first internet-based business, creating an electronic newspaper. He has been active in the computer network community since 1979, participated in the building and growth of USENET from its earliest days, and in 1987 founded and edited a special USENET conference devoted to comedy.

Templeton has been involved in the development of important pieces of software including VisiCalc, the world’s first computer spreadsheet, and Stuffit for archiving and compressing computer files.

In 1996, ClariNet joined the ACLU and others in opposing the Communications Decency Act, part of the Telecom bill passed during Clinton Administration. The U.S. Supreme Court sided with the plaintiffs and ruled that the Act violated the First Amendment in seeking to impose anti-indecency standards on the internet.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Brad Templeton: So there are a couple of things to tell people about Bitcoins. I actually try to help them explain how it works because that does actually have value, but we won't do that in this short thing. But, should you invest in Bitcoins? I tell people no. I tell people that the value that people are applying to Bitcoins today is definitely speculative. And so that doesn't mean you can't make a lot of money, everyone knows what's called the greater fool theory that you make money from greater fools and you hope you're the lesser fool. But obviously there are just as many people who fail on that that is who win on it. So, not necessarily something to invest in today, but the technology, the idea, this is very interesting. This is worth looking at.

So what Bitcoin creates is a ledger that needs no bank. And that's actually pretty important because if you think about what is a bank, at least as far as the money transfer and the checking and savings, not the loan part, but the financial, the moving money part of a bank, it's really — it's a secure ledger. The bank does not just have a little file that says your account has $3,000 in it. They insist that when you write something, they make a note in their ledger that $1,000 is transferred from your account into someone else's account and so on and that's important to make it secure. Well, what the designers of Bitcoin created was a way to make a ledger that's secure and that everyone can trust, but that no one owns or controls. And this allows people to have money that can be free of the influence of governments, which is both bad if you're a government and great if you don't like what governments do with their monetary policies. It lets the policy be set by consensus and software. So Bitcoin basically has found a way to always know what the majority thinks, and by always knowing what the majority thinks, you get something you hope you can trust. In theory if someone controlled more than half of the computers in the world they could take over Bitcoin, but that's pretty unlikely.

So, why is that exciting? Well, I grew up with the internet and I'm old because the .....

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