Why You Should Pay Attention to Bitcoin, with Brad Templeton
Give yourself the gift of knowledge — subscribe to Big Think Edge: http://bit.ly/bigthinkedge
If you're interested in licensing this or any other Big Think clip for commercial or private use, contact our licensing partner Executive Interviews: https://www.executiveinterview....s.biz/rightsholders/
Tech pioneer Brad Templeton calls Bitcoin just one example of how exponential technology is redefining finance. Understanding these changes in advance is a major advantage for individuals and businesses that want to stay a step (or 100 steps) ahead of their peers.
This is a sponsored post. Big Think is happy to partner with Singularity University’s Exponential Finance conference, happening June 2nd and 3rd of 2015 in NYC, because they’re as inspired as we are by new ideas and human potential. 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.
Use Big Think's exclusive Discount code: BIGTHINK500 for $500 off the cost of your ticket to this game-changing event:
http://bit.ly/1IuWpAs
Read more at BigThink.com: http://goo.gl/apXCrm
Follow Big Think here:
YouTube: http://goo.gl/CPTsV5
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BigThinkdotcom
Twitter: https://twitter.com/bigthink
Transcript - Brad Templeton: 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.
While the only thing people use Bitcoin for today is effectively to write checks that transfer title in some Bitcoins to another person or another secret numbered account because it's designed to be public in what you do, but private in terms of who's doing it. It actually becomes possible to do things like write a contract and say "I transfer one Bitcoin to you if the following is true." And so now the contracts are enforced without courts, without any other third party. So the ability for people to just play with that and innovate with that that's really exciting and that's why you want to pay attention to Bitcoin.
