It is normal that after what happened in 2018, many people have lost their hopes in Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general. So the question is: how to trust an industry that promised so many things and throughout the year only brought blunt falls, multiple cases of scams and big thefts?
However, that is just the ugliest part of the story, which people like Tim Draper prefer to remember as simple anecdotes, since the true potential of Bitcoin goes far beyond that.
Tim Draper is all for bitcoins
Draper, a founding partner of Draper Associates and director of Draper University, is a great enthusiast of digital currencies, even years before Bitcoin made its appearance. According to the businessman, he saw for the first time the potential of a digital asset in 2004, when he learned that wealthy people in Korea were paying real money for online game articles. “It made me think that there was an incredible business in virtual products,” he said.
His bitcoin historial
Several years later, in 2011, he met Bitcoin and since then he has not stopped getting involved with technology. As I learned more and more about the digital currency, I understood that it could be used to store value and pay for anything, not just for videogame stuff.
He worked at Coinlab, along with Peter Vincennes, who soon became a company dedicated to mining and innovation with Bitcoins. Soon after, his son started an accelerator called Boost VC, which would become Coinbase’s first investor.
Until this moment, everything seems to be fine for Draper father; However, things started to get difficult when Vincennes bought some BTC for them and decided to save them in the then famous Mt. Gox exchange.
Around the same time, Vincennes told Draper that he would buy mining chips from Butterfly Labs. These two events were the beginning of the fall.
More losses than wins?
First, they lost the cryptocurrencies that they had saved in the famous robbery to Mt. Gox. Then, the mining chips were delayed, because instead of sending them as planned, the company used them to mine by itself. By the time they arrived, mining had increased their difficulty exponentially.
After this, most would believe that Draper would be disappointed with the cryptocurrencies and would like to move away, like many investors at the moment. However, the opposite happened. The businessman was fascinated by the resistance of Bitcoin despite the strong blow he received due to the case of Mt. Gox:
“I realized that the demand for this new digital currency was so strong that even a major theft would not prevent Bitcoin from creating a new way to make transactions, store and transfer money.”
Digital currency, a future plan
He realized that digital currencies could be the answer that many people were looking for after a financial crisis, when a large part of the population lost trust in fiat money and in government.
In addition, in Bitcoin there was the answer for those people who were not bankers, who had not been able to grow economically because the banks in their countries did not consider that they had the necessary requirements to create an account.
That is why a short time later he returned to acquire a good amount of Bitcoins, but this time he would use them for something positive. “I decided that I would use them to support the proliferation of Bitcoins in the markets of emerging countries where people had no confidence in their own currencies.”
The great potential of bitcoins
And like him, many other companies worldwide have seen the great potential that Bitcoin has. It is not just a digital currency, it is the opportunity for many not to depend on the government or a bank to manage their finances, it is an expression of freedom, it is the necessary tool to grow.
Every day more companies join the cryptographic industry. And for Draper, it’s only a matter of time before the others join him. Of course, he points out that it will not be easy, since many of them will have to go through fundamental changes that are almost always difficult, and people should learn that banks, traditional trusted third parties, will soon be replaced by computers that monitor their assets. through the chain of blocks. But this will be overcome and the change will come. That is why Draper ensures that:
“Today, I am more confident than ever that the Bitcoin Revolution is coming.”
Also published on Medium.