Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, attended the Dreamforce 2014 conference held in San Francisco this week. Fielding a variety of questions, he shared some brief thoughts on the future of Bitcoin.
Bitcoin
"has the big chicken and egg challenge, which is until consumers have bitcoin and merchants take bitcoin, you're just not gonna see a huge amount of transaction volume."
said Andreessen. He added that Bitcoin might have a big impact over the next 20 years but that "Apple Pay is the thing that's going to have a big impact in the next 3 years." Andreessen added that the combination of Bitcoin with Apply Pay is going to cause enormous change.
Questioned on his continued support of Bitcoin despite the "price having plummeted", he was quick to respond that it came right back up and that as a venture capitalist, he assumes that 5 out of 10 investments are going straight to zero. He continued
"If anybody is thinking about buying bitcoin for their own portfolio or getting involved in a Bitcoin startup, this is also the way to think about it, which is Bitcoin may or may not work and frankly, I don't think anybody knows one way or the other but if it does work, it could be profound and revolutionary and gigantic."
While confident Bitcoin is the future, Andreessen finished by stating
"The cryptocurrency concept itself is going to become really vitally important, I think it will be in the form of Bitcoin but even if it's not Bitcoin, it will be something else and even if it's not this year, it will be in 5 years or 10 years, it will happen, it's a true advancement in technology."