Why Marc Andreessen is Long on Bitcoin and Short on Apple Pay

Apple Pay is the next big thing that’s ‘freaking out’ financial services companies right now, but, in the long term, bitcoin will prove to be the real innovation, Marc Andreessen has said.
Andreessen was participating in a fireside chat with Bloomberg West anchor and Studio 1.0 host Emily Chang yesterday in San Francisco on the final day of Salesforce’s annual cloud computing conference, Dreamforce 2014.
This week marks 20 years since Andreessen created Netscape Navigator. He now sits at the helm of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
With the Netscape anniversary in mind, Andreessen told Chang that he anticipates more change in the payments space in the next five years than there has been in the previous 20, and that there would be two major drivers of that change: Apple Pay and bitcoin.
‘What we say from our [Andreessen Horowitz’s] standpoint is that, in the long run, bitcoin is by far the most innovative and radical thing,’ he said, adding:

This post was published at Coin Desk on October 17, 2014.