...Bitcoins are like “tulips you can send anywhere in the world in arbitrary quantities”.
-Andreessen Horowitz partner Balaji Srinivasan
Mr.Srinivasan may not be aware that, since ca. 1637 or so, tulips have not had the best connotation in the world of finance.
From FT Alphaville:
The Manhattan Project-type secrecy surrounding a company called 21 Inc — hitherto known as 21e6 — has been stupendous, even by Silicon Valley standards.
Not that this has stopped cryptocurrency friendly journalists like Michael J. Casey at the WSJ (co-author of the Age of Cryptocurrency) and Coindesk’s Pete Rizzo from propagating 21 Inc’s claims about bitcoin being bigger than Google.
All we do know is that the company, headed by Matthew Pauker, has raised more than $116m worth of venture funding, a record for the sector, and claims to be developing technology that they believe will help to mainstream bitcoin.
Leading investors include Andreessen Horowitz, RRE Ventures, a Chinese PE firm called Yuan Capital and Qualcomm. But, Casey reports, the wider investor list includes everyone from PayPal co-founders Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, to eBay co-founder Jeff Skoll and Dropbox Inc CEO Drew Houston, to Expedia Inc. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi and Zynga Inc co-founder Mark Pincus.
To date, the only worthwhile snippets of info as to what 21 Inc might actually do have come by way of Balaji Srinivasan, Andreessen Horowitz partner and 21′s chairman. At a recent event Srinivasan claimed things like … “payments are now packets. Bitcoin is here to stay” and that Bitcoins are like “tulips you can send anywhere in the world in arbitrary quantities”....MUCH MORE
