Patrick M. Byrne

We are on a crazy strategy with our central bank. It's good to have alternative ecosystems. It's not that the dollar will go away, but we need other options if it crashes or wildly inflates.

We know that flat and non-hierarchical systems use information best. I've tried to do that with my own company because it works better that way. And society at large will work better as well if we can get rid of these old institutions and hierarchies. New innovations like the block chain can make this possible.

A major impediment to economic advancement around the world is the fact that the vast majority of humans are unbanked.

When we look at government in Washington or what's happening on Wall Street, we see so much centralization. But really, our goals should be to eliminate and overcome these central institutions. And in recent years we have gained powerful new tools to do this, and most significant among those is the block chain, which is the software behind Bitcoin.

There is an opportunity to recreate the financial world as we know it in the parallel universe that is the blockchain. We are writing rules for this whole new universe.

On the blockchain, you have a public ledger, which is the form of ownership. That means you are not doing net settlement - just netting everything down, which means that everything has been turned into fungible numbers.

I've been all over meeting government ministers and such in Caribbean financial circles. There's a small blockchain movement in the Caribbean. They've been quite a bit more advanced than you might've imagined.

There are dodgy characters in Bitcoin. But there are dodgy characters in cash, too.

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are a form of money that's a stable field that the government can't destroy and can't distort. Because its creation is governed by the laws of mathematics. It can't happen any faster or slower than a certain rate, and it all sort of self-adjusts.

We want a money that some government mandarin can't just whisk into existence with a pen stroke.

Over the next decade, there will be disruption as significant as the Internet was for publishing, where blockchain is going to disrupt dozens of industries, one being capital markets and Wall Street.

I'm not in the business of bayoneting the wounded. I feel the blockchain revolution is kind of my victory. I don't care whether I win it, someone else wins it.