Erik Voorhees: Bitcoin's Point Is 'To Change the Whole Financial System of the Planet.'

The cryptocurrency pioneer explains why governments can't stop bitcoin 'despite all their guns and weapons.'

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Erik Voorhees: Bitcoin's Point Is 'To Change the Whole Financial System of the Planet.'

Few figures in the bitcoin community are as controversial and visionary as Erik Voorhees, founder and CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange ShapeShift.

Back when cryptocurrency was in its infancy and its conferences included lectures delivered to empty rooms, Voorhees was helping to popularize bitcoin's unique attributes with an unregulated online casino called SatoshiDice.

After he sold SatoshiDice, Voorhees was investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and was fined $50,000, observing that the investigators didn't seem to understand bitcoin. "As much as I hated government before," he recalled, "then I was like, 'man, this is what these people do, go around ruining innocent people's lives.'"

The son of libertarian businessman and writer Jacques Voorhees, he discovered bitcoin in 2011 while living in New Hampshire as a member of the Free State Project. Voorhees was employee number three at BitInstant, an early exchange backed by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and whose founder, Charlie Shrem, ultimately went to prison on charges of operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business.

Unlike bitcoin maximalists, who insist that bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency with any viable future, Voorhees maintains that other coins do serve a purpose.

In 2017, as fees on the network were climbing, he controversially backed an unsuccessful attempt to scale up bitcoin's ability to process transactions, which critics said would have weakened the network's security and decentralized structure.

At the Bitcoin 2021 conference in Miami, Voorhees talked to Reason's Nick Gillespie about the immense growth not just in the market caps of cryptocurrencies but in their economic and cultural legitimacy, the ways they challenge central banks and political power, and why he believes in multiple coins and continuing innovation in digital currency.

Comments

[Diane Reynolds (Paul.)]

In 2017, as fees on the network were climbing, he controversially backed an unsuccessful attempt to scale up bitcoin's ability to process transactions, which critics said would have weakened the network's security and decentralized structure

I don't know much about the details of this, but if Voorhees is mucking about with the Winklehimervlossenshift twins, I wouldn't trust his proposal any further than I could throw it.

[mad.casual]

Microtransactions. A second tier (the lightning network) would've allowed coinholders to exchange among themselves for smaller denominations (~$10) faster without reconciling with the blockchain and then roll the balance of those transaction(s) onto the blockchain at the next available cycle. Sorta like how gold is hard to ship so, people switched to paper for daily transactions and banks and governments settled up with gold at the end of the week/month/year. Also, like how paper became cumbersome and slow so people switched to plastic and merchants and banks settled up at the end of the month. Or pretty much any other way any society throughout history branched out from M0 bartering and commodity trading in to M1 money and beyond. Except, you know, different; because crypto.

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[Diane Reynolds (Paul.)]

And we're talking crypto and no one mentions EthereumMAX?

[Apollonius]

The only thing stopping it from changing the whole financial system of the planet is that it's VAPOR. It's not backed by anything. It's the equivalent of "carbon credits" and only has value because people say that it has value.

[jgress]

Well that pretty much goes for any money. While gold always had some use value, most of its value was exchange value, ie what you could buy with it. The advantage of gold was that its supply was naturally limited; governments could not simply create new golds. They could debase and clip coins and force people to accept them at face value rather than according to weight or purity but they could never simply create more gold out of nothing the way they can now conjure fiat money out of nothing.

With Bitcoin the supply is also limited by design. You can’t conjure more Bitcoin into existence than what is already allowed by the software. So it differs quite significantly from fiat currency as we know it in that respect.

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Why Bitcoiners Are Doing What Libertarians Never Could https://freemansperspective.com/why-bitcoiners-are-doing-what-libertarians-never-could/

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[Simon Gee]

Erik Voorhees is a legend!

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I also think it may well become more ambitious.

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