Bitcoin is the biggest land grab since the Internet. That Internet as we know it was created 24 years ago by Tim Berners-Lee with the first web browser called the WorldWideWeb (no spaces). Three years later Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen looked to capitalize on the nascent WorldWideWeb and created a browser that was easier to use and install with the release of Mosaic which we later came to know as Netscape. Netscape at its height was 90 percent of Internet browsing, effectively establishing the timeline for the ‘Internet’ we recognize today. Now there’s a new land grab going on with Bitcoin, a phenomenon which Andreessen recently likened to  Netscape’s bubbling environment 20 years ago:

Bitcoin, or cryptocurrency, the general concept is the first thing I’ve described ‘like the Internet’ since the Internet. So I’ve been waiting 20 years to be able to say, “Ahaaa this is like the Internet,” and this is the first one that I’ve seen. The fundamental innovation, which is really critically important is, cryptocurrency generally, and Bitcoin specifically, are the first practical way for people to do business over the Internet with no prior relationship and with no central hub, no central broker, no central trust authority.

You and I want to exchange money, we want to exchange title to a car or a house, we want to exchange a digital contract, we want to exchange a stock or a bond — we’ve never met before, but we can do it over the Internet, we can do it in a way where it is a unique digital asset, we can do it where everyone knows the exchange is taking place, we can do it where everybody knows there is no double spending, we can do it where everybody can validate the transaction, that’s never existed before. All ecommerce and payments and everything on the Internet up until now has had to run through some kind of central authority. This is the first really distributed way to do that.

The above quote comes from a the OCP Summit V fireside chat with Marc Andreessen, Co-Founder and General Partner, Andreessen Horowitz and Andy Bechtolsheim, Founder, Chief Development Officer and Chairman, Arista Networks moderated by Cade Metz, Senior Editor, Business and Enterprise, Wired. See the entire segment here.

Bullish on Bitcoin

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In SiliconAngle’s latest Bitcoin Crowd Chat, Jon Holmquist, the founder of Bitcoin Black Friday, and the crowd were just as bullish on Bitcoin as Andreessen.

@CrowdDr @furrier Let’s think about it this way, for the last 20 years I’ve been able to put reach c… #bitcoin via https://t.co/ad7AKyXKqX

— Jon Holmquist (@Jon_HQ) February 5, 2014

The enterprise is absolutely taking notice of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. It’s not hard to see why. Take the number of people in the world and multiply that by the number of transactions per year that they do. That’s a pretty big number. Then take the number of software and hardware connections required for those transactions, all of the way down the stack.

During the Crowd Chat, SiliconANGLE Founding Editor Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins was quoted as saying, “I’ve had pings here and there from enterprise datacenter providers that are interested in using portions of their resources for crypto mining. I think as the crypto community gains traction, you’ll see more of that.”

New Currency, New Land

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De-centralizing currency is creating new markets for land grabs within the big land grab. It’s no different than settlers coming to a new uninhabited country. Andreessen is quite confident that in five or 10 years cryptocurrency is how contracts will be done. You’ll use Bitcoin to send the key back and forth on AirBNB to get into the house, or pay for services like Lfyt and Uber. Applications all the way down to individual lock and all the way up to the stock exchange.

I think SiliconANGLE’s Founder and CEO John Furrier sums it up best: the future, or what we’re ‘radical’ on here at SA is data. Data changes the game, and at the core of Bitcoin it is a data-driven currency that has a public ledger that pseudonymously tracks every transaction, ever.

@SetDeep One thing that I’m radical on is that “connected” and “instrumented” data changes the game … #bitcoin via https://t.co/JPn3qaM837

— John Furrier (@furrier) February 5, 2014

Bad News is Good News

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To quote our own Mike Wheatley from earlier this week:

“If something as powerful as Apple bans the use of Bitcoin with its own devices, it shows us that it’s terrified of how strong Bitcoin has become. It’s the same dynamic in Russia – for whatever reason, lawmakers there don’t want people using Bitcoin, and they’re so worried about its rapid adoption that they’ve tried to declare it illegal. Mt. Gox imploded, sure, but it was just the first of many Bitcoin exchanges, and there are dozens of more reliable and better organized pretenders (like Kraken, Coinsetter, or CoinMKT) that are ready to step into its shoes.”

The crowd seemed to agree.

An interesting thread in the Crowd Chat was started when the crowd threw around the question of what could disrupt Bitcoin? Are there any other variants that could shake up Bitcoins position? At this point the crowd sees it as Bitcoins disruption to lose. From Kyt Dotson, Assistant Editor at SiliconANGLE, “To be disrupted a crypto needs to emerge that better solves a problem BTC doesn’t.” Until that happens, Bitcoin is going to be the cryptocurrency that leads the charge.