Bitreserve Clarifies Comparison to Netscape: ‘Bitcoin Could be Integral but Invisible’

When Bitreserve’s CEO Halsey Minor made a blog post comparing Bitcoin to Netscape, it made a lot of people upset. Why, many thought, would the CEO of a Bitcoin company compare Bitcoin to the long defunct web browser? Does he not believe in Bitcoin? If that is the case, what is he doing in the industry?
Predictably, Bitreserve backed off from the comments and edited the post in an attempt to squash the rising outrage by clarifying what Minor meant. But editing posts can only go so far. There is an invisible line where clarifying becomes changing, and changing things while a public debate is going on can seem dishonest, or even cowardly.
But, they never did feel like the true essence of what Minor was trying to say was properly conveyed. I reached out to Bitreserve in hopes of speaking to Halsey Minor again and getting a chance to better understand what he meant when he compared Bitcoin and Netscape.
Instead, I was offered an interview with the head of their product division, Byrne Reese. He has been with the company for a year and whose resume includes the likes of Livejournal, Typepad and Snap.com. He certainly has the qualifications to speak on Bitreserve’s behalf, but I was disappointed that I didn’t get to speak to the man that wrote the post himself.
That being said, the conversation with Byrne was illuminating and helped clarify the controversial comparison.
Byrne told me that TCP/IP would have been a more apt comparison than Netscape. The primary intention of the post wasn’t that Bitcoin would go away, but that the term ‘Bitcoin’ would fade into the background, like TCP/IP and HTTP and HTML did as the internet grew. Both TCP/IP and Bitcoin are protocols. Everyone who uses the internet uses TCP/IP, but the vast majority of internet users have no idea what that means, and that may have fueled Halsey’s decision to use Netscape as an example instead. The average user might not know about the protocols that run the internet, but Netscape was very visible and like bitcoin the currency is now with Bitcoin the protocol, was almost synonymous with the Internet for a time.

This post was published at Coin Telegraph on 2015-03-12.