PayPal

I would be long Bitcoin, and neutral to skeptical of just about everything else at this point with a few possible exceptions. There will be one online equivalent to gold, and the one you'd bet on would be the biggest.

We are big fans of 0x. As the number of tokens becomes infinite, you need a protocol, not just a central exchange, to find counter-parties. Just like you needed a search engine, not just a directory, to find websites as the number became infinite.

After [serving as COO of] PayPal I never thought I would get interested in payments again. But Bitcoin is fulfilling PayPal's original vision to create "the new world currency." We actually had T-shirts printed in 1999 with that mission statement.

A payment is just a credit to one account and a debit to another. That's a database entry. We believed that, if we could get enough people to participate, money would never need to leave the system. PayPal could become the database of money.

. . . [C]ryptocurrencies like bitcoin are now fulfilling that original vision. They are doing it in a decentralized way (with a decentralized database called the blockchain) whereas PayPal tried to do it in a centralized way.

The big development since the emergence of Bitcoin itself is that the underlying enabling technology, the blockchain, has been turned into a developer platform. The leading platform is called Ethereum. It's a platform for creating new kinds of decentralized apps and cryptocurrencies (or "tokens" or "coins"). It's also created a new funding source for this innovation in the form of initial coin offerings (ICOs). So we have all the ingredients necessary for a whole new wave of innovation.

For those of us who lived through the dot-com era, this feels reminiscent. You have some of the same speculative excess and random enrichment. But you can also feel that something revolutionary is happening. Money is being made programmable. That's a fundamental change with implications we can still barely see.