Video of the Day: Interview with Coinbase Founder Brian Armstrong

This is one of the most interesting Bitcoin-related videos I have ever watched, and I have watched plenty. Coinbase has been at the center of BTC news as of late after it became the recipient of the largest investment ever in the Bitcoin space when Andreessen Horowitz announced a $25 million capital infusion. I personally set up an account at Coinbase recently and have been very pleased with my experience so far. I feel even more comfortable having watched the founder Brian Armstrong speak in this video. Not only do I like the way his mind works, but I’m impressed that he has a background in both Computer Science and Economics.

The topics in this video are wide-ranging and it answered a lot of my own personal questions. The highlights for me were:

1) The fact that they keep about 95% of customer BTC offline in cold storage (not connected to the internet). They maintain 5% of customer funds in a hot-wallet used to handle normal day-to-day activity. It was also fun to hear the process of how they go about retrieving offline private keys in the case of outsized trading activity.

2) The potential change within the Bitcoin community to move from price quoting per BTC to mBTC (1/1000 of a bitcoin).

3) The fact that they are in discussions with very large merchants about accepting BTC. He thinks 2014 will be a huge year for merchant adoption (recall just yesterday the CEO of Overstock said they would begin accepting it in 2H14).

4) That the creator of Litecoin works for Coinbase.

These are just some of the topics discussed. An absolute must-watch for anyone interested in Bitcoin.

Like this post?
Donate bitcoins: 35DBUbbAQHTqbDaAc5mAaN6BqwA2AxuE7G


Follow me on Twitter.

6 thoughts on “Video of the Day: Interview with Coinbase Founder Brian Armstrong”

    • I see you are the same troll that polluted this site a month ago. Don’t you have anything better to do in life that obsess about a site you hate?

    • Unfortunately, I talk to guys like this (troll ATM23) every day. They all have these grand opinions and theories about Bitcoin and how the NSA or the CIA invented it and how the governments will “never let it become ubiquitous”, but couldn’t articulate one iota of what it actually is NOR could they speak to the fact the being a currency is only ONE application of the technology.

      Add to that, the unfortunate fact that this writes (and spells) like an illiterate clown and you have the perfect storm (or so I’m sure he’d like to think) of disinformation.

      The truth is that decentralized crypto currencies are here to stay, period. And, no matter how much trolling one does, it’s not going to change that fact.

      He probably should spend some time ACTUALLY educating himself about the technology so that he doesn’t get left behind and say to himself in a year or two, “if I had only….”

      Here is a good place to start: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JP9-lAYngi4

      As for the rest of us in the liberty movement, we will be spreading the message to the very people guys like this boob are trying to dissuade with what appears to be either ill-intentioned fear mongering or just garden variety ignorance.

      Do your own research people and form your own well-informed opinion.

      Long live the Republic!

  1. mike–really? you’re a coinbase fan? i think youre getting a bit sucked into the idea that bitcoin will be ‘supported’ by wall street or oh so closely connected silicon street.

    perhaps coinbase will eventually be destroyed by the wall street owned government, or co-opted.

    when you go on tor—-and look for laundering mixing services like ‘tumblers’ that shuffle coins through various wallets to make it 10X more difficult to track black market bitcoins (stolen or scammed coins whose rightful owners then track the theives’ wallets)

    do you ever wonder if most of the tumblers and black market launder’ers’ for bitcoin are just government traps?

    the power of open-ness and secret-ness stand beside one another like the masks of tragedy and comedy. the banks know all too well how to use both to their advantage. do you believe that a not-so-organized community of bitcoiners ( which indeed is the source of their strength )—-will use open-ness and secretness both to their advantage just as well as the ‘sytem’ does.

    i’m not dissing bitcoin , and certainly not crypto-currency as a concept. but national currencies as expressions of public webs of trust do have a place in society, or at least in rebuilding broken societies by creating new currencies. a fully internationalist currency, accountable to no-one is something far more nefarious than gold. gold can be used honestly (to back a treasury) or not so honestly as a means that a thief can use to secret away his wealth in some bricks and move it across the world. but what about a payment network enabling seemless international payments with a near absent risk of 3rd party clearinghouse interference and low low cost. what are the goods and bads that can be done with it?

    like any powerful tool, it can be used for good and bad, and it probably will. perhaps pandora is already out of the box and there’s no point in arguing about the notion she might willingly go back into it.

    succesful roleout of internationalist currency such as bitcoin would ultimately beg the question of when the timely introduction of systemic globalist currency , such as the SDR would be roled out. if gold is being replaced by bitcoin as honest payment network value representation—-than the next big analgous move is SDR replaces dollar/euro (account for over 90% of international payments now)

    in a hypothetically ‘reformed’ future with an honest set of republics around the world , it would still make sense talking about nation states regulating their domestic currencies–such as the dollar—- and making sure we use the public means to push public policies to secure the dollar from without and within from intentional manipulations and predations and thefts. I could even see this logic applied to the SDR. I don’t see that story really applying to internationalist boundaryless bitcoin in that hypothetical future. a currency whose very existence benefits from under cutting the very monopolistic power of the banks to forcibly funnel money and credit into their feeding troughs by one of a variety of means.

    to be realistic—-, we’re so far down the hole of corruption and dollar based global cia drug laundering , and a million other institutionally corrupted uses of the dollar and credit network built on top of it, that perhaps——-even mentioning a hypothetically reformed future—-without acknowledging the role a healthy competitor to the dollar like bitcoin might play in bringing that future about——-is a bit like putting the horse before the carriage. how do we get to a future where wall street’s suckers and tenatacles are stripped off government? without bitcoin? I don’t think its presence could hurt. and it could possible do a world of good. perhaps double so as it facilitates a social network of users who are instictively distrustful of big brother because of the money he gets paid by big banker—the fed that is—-funding his salary by buying up an ever greater portion of treasuries.

    it is hard to over-estimate how corrupt the u.s. has become. and i don’t think anyone in the u..s is buying the narrative anymore. the new narrative is you are either with the system or against the system. the next president to embrace this mutually exclusive mindset won’t be applying it to iraq as george bush did, but to the american public. a frightening prospect in a future where bitcoiners are made the enemy of the state. the rallying cry of money seems to resonate with bitcoiners sense of innate justice, that doesn’t seem to hold the same easily shrugged off notions of leftist social justice or blase’ stand your ground libertarianism . the rallying cry of a ‘free’ currency is as much a directly aggressive threat to the dollar based system—-as it is a nebulously sticky behavior . you don’t need to wear bitcoin on your sleave like a political slogan for it to be effective. and thus it’s usage won’t disappear as easily as does sloganeering and quick dispersal ‘protesting’.

    im not so sure i see where coinbase survives in that future, where bitcoin graduates from countercultural to quasi revolutionary. Perhasp the public role of a compliant bitcoin industry base is in it being co-opted as a tool to the state to secretly inject money into target states and target groups both outside of the u.s. and inside it.

    if you cannot beat’em, join em?

    Reply

Leave a Reply