The Internet of Money Quotes

“At the end of the day, bitcoin is programmable money. When you have programmable money, the possibilities are truly endless. We can take many of the basic concepts of the current system that depend on legal contracts, and we can convert these into algorithmic contracts, into mathematical transactions that can be enforced on the bitcoin network. As I’ve said, there is no third party, there is no counterparty. If I choose to send value from one part of the network to another, it is peer-to-peer with no one in between. If I invent a new form of money, I can deploy it to the entire world and invite others to come and join me. Bitcoin is not just money for the internet. Yes, it’s perfect money for the internet. It’s instant, it’s safe, it’s free. Yes, it is money for the internet, but it’s so much more. Bitcoin is the internet of money. Currency is only the first application. If you grasp that, you can look beyond the price, you can look beyond the volatility, you can look beyond the fad. At its core, bitcoin is a revolutionary technology that will change the world forever. Join”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, The Internet of Money

“One of my favorite words is a French word: sousveillance. It is the opposite of surveillance. Surveillance means to look from above; sousveillance means to look from below. In their dream of nation-states controlling all of our financial futures, they made one major miscalculation. It’s a hell of a lot harder for a few hundred thousand people to watch 7 1/2 billion. But what do you think happens when 7 1/2 billion of us stare back? When the panopticon turns around? When our financial systems, our communication systems, are private, and secrecy is an illusion that can’t be sustained? When crimes committed in the names of states and powerful corporations are vulnerable to hackers and whistleblowers and leakers? When everything eventually comes out? We have a great advantage because the natural balance of the system is one in which individuals can have privacy but the powerful cannot have secrecy anymore.”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, The Internet of Money

“There are almost 200 currencies of the world, but there’s only one international currency. There are almost 200 currencies controlled by central banks and governments, but there is only one mathematical currency today, and that is bitcoin. We are going to build more of them. Cryptographic currencies are going to be a mainstay of our financial future. They are going to be a part of the future of this planet because they have been invented. It’s as simple as that. You cannot un-invent this technology. You cannot turn this omelette back into eggs.”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, The Internet of Money

“Bitcoin is a dumb network supporting really smart devices, and that is an incredibly powerful concept because bitcoin pushes all of the intelligence to the edge. It doesn’t care if the bitcoin address is the address of a multimillionaire, the address of a central bank, the address of a smart contract, the address of a device, or the address of a human. It doesn’t know. It doesn’t care if the transaction is carrying lots of money or not much money at all. It doesn’t care if the address is in Kuala Lumpur or downtown New York. It doesn’t know, it doesn’t care.​ It moves money from one address to another based on a simple locking script. And that means that if you want to build a new application on top of bitcoin, you can upgrade the devices and you can build an application. You don’t need to ask for anyone’s permission to innovate. ​ ​Write the app, launch it on your endpoint, and bitcoin will route it, because bitcoin is a dumb network. That is the power of innovation on the internet. It’s innovation without permission. It’s innovation without central approval. It’s innovation without a broad network upgrade. And that means bitcoin is not a specific financial network. It’s not a financial network for large transactions or small transactions, fast transactions or slow transactions. It’s whatever you want to use it for, based upon what you choose to do at the endpoint.”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, The Internet of Money

“This isn’t about nation-states anymore. This isn’t about who adopts bitcoin first or who adopts cryptocurrencies first, because the internet is adopting cryptocurrencies, and the internet is the world’s largest economy. It is the first transnational economy, and it needs a transnational currency.”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, The Internet of Money

“There are a billion people, right now, with access to the internet and feature phones who could use bitcoin as an international wire-transfer service.”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, The Internet of Money

“Bitcoin isn’t a digital currency. It’s a cryptocurrency. It’s a network-centric money. I really like the idea of a network-centric money. A network that allows you to replace trust in institutions, trust in hierarchies, with trust on the network. ​The network acting as a massively diffuse arbiter of truth, resolving any disagreements about transactions and security in a way where no one has control. ​ ​”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, The Internet of Money

“As the adage of the entire internet once went, “I just replaced your entire industry with 100 lines of Python code,” that’s exactly what we’re doing with bitcoin.”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, The Internet of Money

“Six and a half billion people on this planet have no connection to the world of money. They operate in cash-based societies with very little access to international resources. ​ ​They don’t need banks.”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, The Internet of Money

“If you read anything about bitcoin, you’ll see the very same things that they said about the internet in the early '90s. It is a haven for pedophiles, terrorists, drug dealers, and criminals. How many of you in this room have bitcoin? How many of you in this room are terrorists, pedophiles, drug dealers or criminals? Audience laughs You see the thing about bitcoin is while they push this story, every now and then someone who has never heard of bitcoin notices an important thing: it’s still not dead, which is always surprising because every two or three months there is an article that says it’s dead. That’s great marketing. Because every time someone hears it’s dead and three months later they hear it’s still not dead, they think, "Huh, this thing really tends to survive." I call bitcoin "the internet of money,” but perhaps we should call it “the zombie of currencies.” It is the currency that is the undead. The”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, The Internet of Money

“Bitcoin represents a fundamental transformation of money. An invention that changes the oldest technology we have in civilization. That changes it radically and disruptively by changing the fundamental architecture into one where every participant is equal. Where transaction has no state or context other than obeying the consensus rules of the network that no one controls. Where your money is yours. You control it absolutely through the application of digital signatures, and no one can censor it, no one can seize it, no one can freeze it. No one can tell you what to do or what not to do with your money. It is a system of money that is simultaneously, absolutely transnational and borderless. We’ve never had a system of money like that.”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, The Internet of Money

“Today, I want to talk about dumb networks. I want to talk about smart networks. I want to talk about the value of open source when it meets finance. And I want to talk about the festival of the commons. ​ Bitcoin is a currency. Bitcoin is a network. Bitcoin is a technology. And you can’t separate these things. A consensus network that bases its value on currency does not work without the currency. ​You can’t just do the blockchain without a valuable currency behind it, and the currency doesn’t work without the network. Bitcoin is both. It is the convergence of a participatory consensus network and a global, borderless currency that is fungible, fast, and secure.

 Today, I want to talk a bit about the bitcoin network and focus on one concept that has some parallels to the early internet.”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, The Internet of Money

“Bitcoin is not a currency. Bitcoin is the internet of money. As a technology, it can bring economic inclusion and empowerment to billions of people in the world. I’ll give you one example of a specific application that is going to fundamentally change the lives of more than a billion people in the next five to ten years. ​ Every day, an immigrant somewhere cashes their paycheck and stands in line to wire 50 percent of that paycheck back to their home country to feed their extended family. Here in the US, 60 million people have no bank accounts, yet they cash their paychecks and send them abroad. Overall in the world, $550 billion is transmitted every year as remittances from first-world countries. Much of that money is sent to five major destinations: Mexico, India, the Philippines, Indonesia, and China. In some of these places, remittances represent up to 40 percent of the local economy. Sitting on top of that flow of $550 billion are companies like Western Union, and they take, on average, a cut of 9 percent of every single one of these transactions out of the pockets of the poorest people of the world. Imagine what happens when one day one of these immigrants figures out they can do the same thing with bitcoin — not for 15 percent, not 10 percent, not 5 percent, but for 5 cents. Not a percentage; a flat fee. What happens when they can do that? They can, right now. There is a startup company that is handling remittances between the US and the Philippines. They’re doing a few million dollars right now, but they’re going to start growing. There’s $500 billion sitting behind that dam. When you’re an immigrant and you can change your financial future by not paying 9 percent to send money home, imagine what happens if every month, instead of sending 91 dollars home, you send 100 dollars home. That makes a difference. There are a billion people, right now, with access to the internet and feature phones who could use bitcoin as an international wire-transfer service.”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, The Internet of Money

“We’ve seen what happens with the development of the cell-phone technology that was deployed in Africa faster than any other technology ever in the history of humanity. We see small villages, where they have no running water, wood fires to cook with, and no electricity — yet there’s one little solar panel on top of a mud hut and that solar panel is not there for light. It’s there to charge a Nokia 1000 feature phone. That phone gives them weather reports, grain prices at the local market, and connects them to the world. What happens when that phone becomes a bank? Because with bitcoin, it can be a bank. What happens when you connect 6 1/2 billion people to a global economy without any barriers to access? ​ ​”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, The Internet of Money

“There are 2 billion people who have no bank accounts at all. There are another 4 billion people who have very limited access to banking. ​ Banking without international currencies, banking without international markets, banking without liquidity. Bitcoin isn’t about the 1 billion. Bitcoin is all about the other 6 1/2. The people who are currently cut off from international banking. What do you think happens when you suddenly are able to turn a simple text-messaging phone in the middle of a rural area in Nigeria, connected to a solar panel, into a bank terminal? Into a Western Union remittance terminal? ​Into an international loan-origination system? A stock market? An IPO engine? At first, nothing, but give it a few years.”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, The Internet of Money

“​4.1.1. The Blockchain and Proof-of-Work Why is bitcoin immutable? What gives bitcoin the characteristics of immutability? ​ ​What is it that makes it unchangeable? The first answer that comes to mind for most people is "the blockchain." The blockchain makes bitcoin immutable because every block depends on its predecessor, creating an unbreakable chain back to the genesis block, and if you change something it would be noticed. Therefore, it’s unchangeable. That is the wrong answer, because it’s not really "the blockchain" that gives bitcoin its immutability. That’s a really important nuance to understand. The blockchain makes sure that you can’t change something without anyone noticing. In security we call that "tamper-evident": if you change it, it is evident. ​ ​ You cannot tamper with it without leaving evidence of your tampering. But there’s a higher standard in security. We call it "tamper-proof": something that cannot be tampered with. ​ ​ Not just “will be visible if it’s tampered with,” but “cannot be tampered with.” Immutable. The characteristic that gives bitcoin its tamper-proof capability is not "the blockchain”; it’s proof-of-work.”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, The Internet of Money Volume Two

“Do not underestimate this. Do not listen to the people who tell you that bitcoin is just for pornographers, terrorists, drug dealers, and gamblers. Remember that they said the exact same thing about the internet. But when 2 or 3 million people got online, we found out that they are not interested in those things—they are interested in sharing cat videos, and now we have an internet of a billion cat videos.”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, The Internet of Money Volume Two

“Bitcoin today, and all of the currencies that are built using that recipe, are at the same stage that the internet was in 1992. Only now we have the internet, and so the rate of exponential growth has already started. The innovation is growing at an astonishing rate. I spend every single day, full-time, trying to keep up with bitcoin and it’s almost impossible. ​”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, The Internet of Money Volume Two

“What bitcoin gives us is a hard promise: the program will execute exactly as specified.”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, The Internet of Money Volume Two

“Sometimes I speak to various regional banks, the ones that are not afraid of bitcoin. They tell me things like 80 percent of our population is a hundred miles from the nearest bank branch and we can’t serve them. In one case, they said a hundred miles by canoe. I’ll let you guess which country that was. Yet, even in the remotest places on Earth, now there is a cell-phone tower. Even in the poorest places on Earth, we often see a little solar panel on a little hut that feeds a Nokia 1000 phone, the most produced device in the history of manufacturing, billions of them have shipped. We can turn every one of those into, not a bank account, but a bank. Two weeks ago, President Obama at South by Southwest did a presentation and he talked about our privacy. He said, ”If we can’t unlock the phones, that means that everyone has a Swiss bank account in their pocket." That is not entirely accurate. I don’t have a Swiss bank account in my pocket. I have a Swiss bank, with the ability to generate 2 billion addresses off a single seed and use a different address for every transaction. That bank is completely encrypted, so even if you do unlock the phone, I still have access to my bank. That represents the cognitive dissonance between the powers of centralized secrecy and the power of privacy as a human right that we now have within our grasp. If you think this is going to be easy or that it’s going to be without struggle, you’re very mistaken.”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, The Internet of Money

“innovation that was pioneered by one of the big banks, I think in 2007. They realized that if you were close to the overdraft limit, if instead of running the big transaction first they flipped the order of the transactions and ran a lot of small ones, you’d pay a 25-dollar fee for every one of them, and they could maximize their fees. That’s the kind of innovation they were focused on.”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, The Internet of Money

“What I loved about cooking is that it is the perfect combination of art and science. If you fundamentally understand how the ingredients work, how they behave, and how the chemistry changes when they’re combined or when you add a catalyst like salt or when you apply heat to them, then you can create. You can create almost anything. As long as you understand how the ingredients work, you can execute and deliver anything you want to create.”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, The Internet of Money

“Bitcoin is a dumb network supporting really smart devices, and that is an incredibly powerful concept because bitcoin pushes all of the intelligence to the edge.”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, The Internet of Money

“In a world of tinkers, of experimenters, of makers, open wins. The reason it wins is that it allows innovation to flourish at the edges.”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, The Internet of Money

“At its very basic level, money isn’t value. Money represents an abstraction of value; it’s a way of communicating value. It’s a language. Therefore, money is as old as language because the ability to communicate value is as old as language and money. In many ways, it has characteristics that make it a linguistic construct. It’s a form of communication.”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, The Internet of Money

“esas monedas, al final, son realmente otra forma de lenguaje. Un lenguaje por el cual comunicamos nuestras expectativas y deseos de valor, y ahora que podemos hacerlo a escala global, ahora que cada uno de nosotros puede crear innovadoras monedas, nuestras opiniones realmente importarán.”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Internet del dinero

“Debemos acostumbrarnos a vivir en un mundo donde tenemos que juzgar las monedas no por quién las emite, sino por quienes las aceptan y aprecian.”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Internet del dinero

“La moneda es ahora un medio de expresión. Pero si todo el mundo puede ahora crear un moneda, ¿Cómo adquiere su valor y que significado o utilidad tiene? ¿Cuál es la diferencia entre la moneda como una expresión de popularidad, como una expresión de deseo, como un meme, una moda, una marca? Ahí abajo ahora mismo, Andreas señala fuera del auditorio, se está celebrando un concurso de ídolos adolescentes canadienses. Uno de los concursantes, Amir, cuenta con un gran grupo de fieles seguidores. Tal vez quiera crear AmirCoin para que sus fans puedan expresar su deseo de verle bailar. ¿Por qué no? La gente me ha sugerido crear AndreasCoin. Creo que es un poco tonto. Pero, ¿Por qué no? Pienso que en algún momento veremos cosas así. No tendremos cientos de altcoins. No tendremos miles de altcoins. Tendremos cientos de miles, y después, millones de altcoins. Entonces, habrá miles de altcoins que se crearán cada día para organizar comunidades locales, para expresar modas, para crear concursos de popularidad, para codificar el último meme de Internet.”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Internet del dinero

“bitcoin is open source, open standard, and open network.”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, The Internet of Money

“Bitcoin creates an environment that is ripe for innovation, because it’s not just a currency; it’s a technology, a network, and a currency.”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, The Internet of Money