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Blockchain is Bigger Than the Gutenberg Press And the Internet, Says Overstock CEO

source-logo  investinblockchain.com 25 March 2019 08:30, UTC

Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne is a well-known crypto enthusiast, who has the long-term growth of the market in mind. In a recent interview with Bitcoin.com, he showered glowing praise on the capabilities of blockchain to remove trust from economic systems and distribute power to the masses.

Byrne called the blockchain revolution “bigger than the Gutenberg press and bigger than the internet,” a bold claim that he believes is backed by blockchain’s potential to give us an unprecedented means to trade value:

I think that a 1000 years from now…this revolution is going to be bigger than the Gutenberg press, bigger than the internet. It’s changing the way humans interact. Instead of creating third-party institutions which are corruptible, we’re reducing things to mathematics and cryptographically protected algorithms.

Byrne is also the CEO of tZero, a distributed ledger platform for capital markets that went live in late January 2019. Byrne is taking his experience and understanding of traditional markets and marrying that with blockchain platforms.

In an interview at the Beyond Blocks Summit 2018 in Tokyo, Byrne said that, with tZero, they were trying to create a “new version of Wall Street”:

We’re trying to create a new version of Wall Street based on the blockchain – one that is fair and provably fair…so we started out by buying a node in the center of Wall Street and building out, and it’s built on top of an SEC registered broker deal.

Overstock’s relationship with cryptocurrency started in 2014, when it became an early retailer that accepted bitcoins for its products. tZero is expected to launch its mobile trading app in June of this year.

Byrne began championing the technology and digital assets back when it was still relatively unknown, or at least before some big price surges.

He sees 6 key sectors being transformed by blockchain: voting, digital identities, real estate/titling, securities exchanges, banking and supply chains. These are only some of the many industries blockchain can be applied to.

investinblockchain.com