Wall Street Has Been MIA In The $150 Billion Industry

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Bart Stevens – Blockchain Capital at invest for Kids Conference

Emergence of a new asset class and technology.

Wall Street has been absent in the $150b in value created this year, which is unusual.

Is Bitcoin a bubble?
What is Blockchain?
Regulation?
New piece of fin tech called ICO?

Is bitcoin a bubble? –> Has done some research into bubbles, you find patterns.. there’s always the presence of leveraged speculators and they’re financial incumbents. What you don’t see here is those players. Nobody is long this stuff. It’s young people. Overwhelming consensus we’re in a bubble. Scale matters a lot in bubbles, in dot com there was 4.5T in market cap that went away. If it’s a bubble it won’t hurt wall street or mainstreet bc no one owns yet. Expect money to move here and we’re early in the move. Bitcoin is closer to a Gold 2.0.

Blockchain –> a network of 100k’s of computers, the infrastructure layer. There’s multiple Blockchains. It’s the worlds largest decentralized data base. This is larger than all of GOOG’s data centers combined x 1000. At the infrastructure it’s never been hacked, only at the second party level. Will bring new services to the world, in early days of the adoption of this technology. Not going away.

Regulation –> Not illegal. The IRS will tax you on it as a digital commodity. Was misused by criminals. Regulators have given the rules of the road. We want to know the rules of the road to reduce uncertainty.

ICOs –> $3.25b raised this year so far. More raised here than NASDAQ IPOs this year. The ideas of a tokenized network. Crowdsourced capital and distribute out a token that represents a portion of their network. Tokens solve the technology problem, the cold start problem.. how to get folks to care and jump start it. The network effect says liquidity brings more liquidity. Built on Etherium Blockchain. A platform for crowdsourcing capital from future users of your network. Average company currently takes 9 years to go public, now 9 months on Blockchain. Open to everyone.

 

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