Balaji Srinivasan: prediction

Transcript context

…I can right now buy crypto assets through third-party intermediaries, and they, too, will charge me fees. It just feels, as a customer, a lot like the fees I pay to my other intermediaries. It’s true I have the option of doing it myself, but for most people, that’s very, very costly to figure out how to secure a wallet and how crypto assets work in the first place. They would rather pay the fee, basically, of two percent of their wealth. So why aren’t we just reintroducing intermediaries at some other stage of the game, and we’ll end up paying fees just like we used to? I think there will be a business model of some kind. What you call fees may shift to another part of the system. As an example, Germany recently repatriated several tons of gold from the United States — their central bank did. That was something that took three or four years and cost so many millions of dollars. In theory, the same amount of money could have been moved in Bitcoin for a fraction of that cost. There’s already certain contexts where we’ve reduced fees by several orders of magnitude for very large movements of money. Then what’s going to happen is, these new business models that arise are not going to have exactly the same fee structure as the old ones. There will be a business model. They’ll still continue to make money, but they’re going to tax what is scarce, and that may not be necessarily the wire transfer itself. But they may charge some money management fees or other kinds of things like that. The most important thing, from my standpoint, is the level of choice you’re going to have is going to be dramatically increased because the blockchain makes it much easier to startup a competitor and raise up your own shingle as a new financial outlet. A question about tokens. Here’s a statement. Tell me if you think it’s true, false, or uncertain. The role of the ICO is to aggregate dispersed information about a company. ICO, initial coin offering.…

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