Thinking about the adoption of Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies, what are the barriers to adoption within the five to ten years, with convincing people to use them?

[AUDIENCE] Thinking about the adoption of Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies, what are the barriers [to adoption] within the five to ten years, with [convincing] people to use them? Obviously, complexity is a big one that you just talked about. Hopefully, in the future, it will be easier. [ANDREAS] Again, it depends on what you mean by "[convince] people to use them." One of the fundamental problems we have is, in hindsight, we see how a technology [developed]... and how people chose to use it, [including in ways which weren't originally factored into] the design people had. I would challenge you to go back and look at science fiction from the '60s and '70s, at what they envisioned future computers to be. [They] were giant mechanical brains that lived in enormous cabinets, and primarily solved problems of logic. Star Trek and some of the most advanced sci-fi programs out there had this idea of [computers]... [with a] "bloop bloop" communicator and maybe video conferencing. Do you know what they missed? They missed the idea of a 14-year old being a world-acclaimed blogger. [Laughter] They missed the shift from authority and centralized sources to the democratization of publishing, where a person -- at the right time, with the right device -- can become part of history just by being there. They missed the idea of viral memes and [a lot] of things that rolled out of the internet. The reason they missed them was because nobody [knew they] needed [them at the time]. There is a apocryphal story that Henry Ford said, "If you asked people what they wanted, they would have said 'faster horses'." [Laughter] If you ask people what they want Bitcoin to do for them, they will say, "I want to buy a cup of coffee [with it]." That is what money does for them today. They don't imagine themselves with a device that does arbitrage between different [currency] markets. They don't imagine using micro-satoshi payments [in a self-driving] autonomous vehicle... that is negotiating lane access with the car next to it. They don't imagine building solar panel systems on their house that are [off-grid], [while] selling micro bursts of electricity to passing smartphone users through wireless charging stations. They don't imagine any of these things because none of these things are [currently] possible.

Disruptive technologies take previously existing categories, smash them together, and build things at the joint which didn't exist before

So when you [ask], 'what [will] it be like to use these technologies,' we [must] realize this: Disruptive technologies take previously existing categories, smash them together, and build things at the joint which didn't exist [before]. We couldn't imagine most of the things that happened on the internet because they couldn't exist [at the time]. Bitcoin will change our very conception of what a payment is. Today, we imagine money primarily as a batch function; you pay [in chunks] at a determined period in time. I have talked about the concept of streaming money, which is about breaking down that [time] barrier. You could do micropayments in milliseconds, to the point where [the time dimension] of money... switches into a wave, a flow. Now you can start thinking about earning [your] salary by the second. As [you] work through the [day], with every second that passes, a tiny trickle of money flows into [your] wallet. Simultaneously, [you will be] buying other services. If [you] get into an Uber, [you can] buy [sixteen] minutes of insurance for that ride, streaming [almost a million] milliseconds worth of money for the precise duration [you were] in the car. When you start [considering] breaking down the concepts of time, you realize that we haven't even imagined [all the possible] applications.

One of the key things to understand about Bitcoin what we use it for today, what Venezuelans use it for, what Americans might use it for in ten years, are completely different things, even ten completely different things

One of the key things to understand about Bitcoin: what we use it for today, what Venezuelans use it for, what Americans might use it for in ten years, are completely different things, even ten completely different things. We can't fathom what [Bitcoin and its use cases will] be like. I was at a conference recently and they showed me one of the old clocks in the center of town. It had been financed by private money. I was thinking about the nature of clocks. Most people don't realize that the Industrial Revolution didn't just change our ability to tell time; it changed our understanding of what time was. Until then, if you wanted to meet someone, you would say, "Meet at midday in the square." That meant plus or minus an hour, not because you couldn't measure the concept of minutes, it was [just] something you couldn't fathom; it didn't exist as a concept [in common usage]. Industrialization moved [our thinking into] minutes and seconds. What happens when we do that to money? What happens when we change payments into micropayments, then nanopayments... on a scale of nanoseconds? We don't know these applications. We [may] never know what they are. What does it mean to become mainstream? Creating applications that were previously impossible to do, for people who didn't know they needed them, until they discovered that they could do something new.