PayPal’s founders and Bitcoin’s ‘ridiculous’ status

Max Levchin, one of the founders of PayPal, says that as an asset class bitcoin is ‘ridiculous’ but believes the current decline is a good thing because it is ‘zeroing on fair value, whatever that is’.
Levchin was speaking on a panel at the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco with fellow PayPal alumni Reid Hoffman, now of LinkedIn, and Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO of Yelp.com during a volatile month where the value of a bitcoin had risen by nearly $US100 dollars, or 133 per cent.
At the start of October, bitcoin had hit just above $US300 – its lowest point since its late-November high of $US1147.
All three alum agreed, however, that cryptocurrencies like bitcoin were ‘here to stay’ but disagreed on whether bitcoin would survive as a currency. Hoffman is an investor in the space via Xapo, while Stoppelman owns units of the currency.
Hoffman said that bitcoin was probably most likely to become the dominant cryptocurrency because it was attracting the scale and network effect to make it sustainable. ‘Bitcoin is adding more wallets every day or every week than every other wallet (from rival currency platforms) in total,’ he told the audience.

This post was published at Business Spectator on October 15, 2014.