Tim Ferriss: What do most people not understanding about Crypto Currency?
Marc Andreessen: A couple of things. So this will not come as a surprise to you. I thought I understood it, and I really didn’t. Money gets people really cranked up.
Tim Ferriss: Yes, it does.
Marc Andreessen: The entire concept of money is probably, maybe after God, it’s like the single most emotionally loaded concept that we have in humanity. Like money just makes people mad under any circumstances on any topic related to money. And I think it’s just because it’s just something that we all rely on, and it’s something that we always think of as there’s always a sense of unfairness. And so money gets people really cranked up. And so I think there is sort of the idea of Crypto Currency and block chain and this kind of new idea of distributed trust on the internet.
And then, there is this application of that technology, which is a very fundamental application, which is a new kind of money. I think most people are unable to just simply, objectively, dispassionately look at the mechanics of how it works without almost getting preemptively upset, like just angry. How dare the nerds come up with some new form of money? There has got to be something wrong with this. And I will now attempt to find the 30 possible things that could be wrong with this until I find one that, basically, proves that this can’t possibly work because, obviously, it violates the laws of nature and government and whatever, whatever.
And somehow, I’m going to come out on the wrong side of this. And by the way, I’m not even just talking about like regular people. I’m talking about bank CEO’s just are furious. You bring up Bitcoin, and they just get really upset. And I’m like did you get upset about your new toaster? It’s just a technology. It’s just a thing. And you can study it, and you can learn about it, and you can think about it. And you’ll either conclude it’s good or not. But it’s not going to bite you. It’s just a thing. And so the way I look at it, it’s just a thing. We now have this idea of Crypto Currency. It’s a fundamentally new and very important idea.
We now have this ability to have this new kind of currency based on top – everybody has had 18,000 theories of why it’s not possibly going to work. Bitcoin is still working today, exactly the same as it worked last year and the year before that and the year before that. By all the noise and all of the stuff and all of the crashes and this and that and the other thing, it just continues to work. It just is. It’s becoming like air or water. It just is, like it or hate it. It just is.
