Brian Armstrong: belief

Transcript context

…The new transactions that will be enabled by Ethereum 2.0 — what exactly will I do with those? I understand if I have this suppressed burning desire to make micropayments — like to read people’s articles and pay them a fraction of a cent — that this new platform might help me do that. But I’m not sure I have such a demand. What else can the platform do for me? Or do you think the demand to make micropayments is really very strong? I don’t think there’s anybody who’s sitting around saying, “God, I wish I could make more microtransactions,” I agree with that, but I think whenever you give developers and entrepreneurs new tools, they tend to create new apps, and they try to take advantage of that medium and do something new. It’s just like the early days of the internet. A lot of people looked at it, and they said, “There’s some kind of blinking text” or “There’s a video of a cat” or something. “This is a toy. Why would we ever use this? Why would people ever spend their time on it? And that’s not real.” Of course, over time, people made new things that took advantage of that medium that people really resonated with. Or you can say the same thing about smartphones or the same thing about movies versus the theater. When movies first came out, they were just filming what might happen in the theater, but they had to take advantage of that medium and do something new. I think the same thing is happening here with crypto, and that scalability is just one of those new tools that it’s really hard to say what could come out of it, but I do believe people will be creative and come up with new stuff. As you know, central banks have started talking about doing electronic reserve currencies. China might be the first to do this. Sweden and Singapore have at least raised the idea. Do you view that as a competitor to crypto or something crypto can somehow build upon or work with, a complement of crypto?…

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