Overstocked.com CEO Patrick Byrne On Accepting Bitcoin

Few big companies have expressed as much optimism about Bitcoin as the online retail giant Overstock.com, which became the first major retailer in the world to start accepting Bitcoin as payments for its goods earlier this year.

The driving force behind that move was none other than Overstock.com’s Bitcoin-loving CEO Patrick Byrne, who followed up by later offering to pay his employee’s bonuses in the cryptocurrency as well. But Byrne’s Bitcoin ambitions go much further than just doing his ‘bit’ to help it go mainstream.

Speaking at a Bitcoin conference in Las Vegas this week, Byrne revealed that Overstock.com has hired two CounterParty developers to create the code for a kind of decentralized stock exchange. The exchange will allow companies, including Overstock, to issue financial securities securely over the web on top of the CounterParty platform (which uses the Bitcoin blockchain). Essentially what he’s trying to do is bypass the kind of centralized stock exchange found in New York’s Wall Street.

Overstock has code-named the project “Medici”, and plans to spin it off into its own company to continue the software’s development.

“There is an opportunity to recreate the financial world as we know it in the parallel universe that is the blockchain,” said Byrne in an interview with Wired.com.

Once Medici has been built, something that’s still several months off), Byrne plans to ask regulators to approve his platform. He appreciates that’s easier said than done, which is why he’s hired the Perkins Coie law firm to help in this endeavor.

The basic premise is that companies (both startups and established ones) will be able to ‘go public’ more easily, and it’ll be cheaper for everyone too. Byrne says the platform will be approximately 20 percent cheaper than doing things the traditional way.

Byrne appears to be deadly serious about the venture too, claiming to have committed between five and ten percent of Overstock.com’s earnings into the project. It could prove to be money well spent though, as Byrne claims Medici could one day become worth even more than Overstock itself.