Brian Armstrong: belief

Transcript context

…It confuses D-I-E-M and D-E-E-M, and it looks like a Vietnamese word. Libra, I thought, was fine, and it doesn’t evoke anything. The name of your company, Coinbase — it’s a great name. A base, a solid, coin, money, evokes notions of banking and payments and transfer and funds management. But Diem — what do you think of? You think of some obscure general in the Vietnamese war in the late 1950s. I think of it like per diem or something, like your daily payment you’d get. By the way, naming things turns out to be incredibly hard just because of global trademark issues and all these things. It’s so hard to find unused names that are good. But what do I think will become of it? Look, I give them a lot of credit for being forward thinking on this. Of the big FAANG tech companies, Facebook was really one of the first to go embrace this technology in a big way and see some of the potential of it, and they’ve taken their own approach to it which now, of course, is not run by Facebook. It’s this bigger organization. Of course, they managed to upset everybody in DC pretty much by doing it, which I didn’t think was totally fair. As I mentioned earlier, China, I think, is pretty far ahead in digitizing the yuan. They’ve been working on this for maybe six or more years. They have this thing working, and there are people actually using it. In the US, we don’t have necessarily state-controlled things. We try to rely on the private industry to innovate. In my mind, that was Facebook trying at least. Whether they were going to succeed or not, who knows, but they were trying to innovate there and do something that would help America globally. The US government had a pretty negative reaction to it, I think, because it was Facebook. But then, once they realized they were maybe potentially a little behind China, the US Treasury started to think about, “All right, what is our solution going to be?” And they’re now looking out for that, I think. I hope that they continue to make progress on that, whether they use USD Coin or Diem, or they create something entirely new themselves because it would be unfortunate to see the yuan — from a global perspective, maybe, who knows if it would be bad — but from a US point of view, it would be bad to see the US lose its reserve currency status or something like that over a miss in technology adoption. Who is Satoshi? Give us your best guess.…

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