The blockchain/crypto week in quotes

“We are only beginning to see the benefits that blockchain technology will bring to our societies, including in our democratic processes. Concordium’s blockchain-based voting solution offers a means of voting that is trustworthy, quick, and cost-effective. I am pleased to be working with Concordium to make sure that every vote is counted.” Anders Fogh Rasmussen, former Secretary-General of NATO and former Prime Minister of Denmark and now Strategic Advisor to Concordium

“There are huge operational consequences for central banks in implementing monetary policy and implications for the stability of the financial system. Central banks do not put a brake on innovations just for the sake of it. But neither should they speed ahead disregarding all traffic conditions.” Agustin Carstens, General Manager at the Bank for International Settlements

“Ultimately behind the scenes, crypto disruptors are going to have to use a bank to move funds. There’s more partnership instead of competition in that space. When it comes to margins and capabilities, payments is never something that grows in margin, nobody wants to pay for a payment. That’s one of the hardest parts of this process: you have limited resources in the capability to sell, so you need highly efficient and large players.” Ron Karpovich, Global Head of E-commerce Solutions, JP Morgan Chase

“Comparing cryptocurrencies to the early days of the internet is nonsense. A decade since the launch of the WWW in 1991 there were over one billion users of the internet, not the approximate 70 million wallets of crypto most of them dormant. A decade after the launch of the internet there were dozens of killer apps – such as email, web sites, etc – and exponentially increasing transactions in the billions of units; while in crypto there is not a single killer app – apart from useless “krypto-kitties”, Ponzi Pyramids and Casino Games with miniscule transactions – while total transaction volume has collapsed since 2018 by over 85%.

And in successful real technologies like the internet or stock trading transaction costs collapse over time. Instead in crypto, transaction costs – measured as miners’ revenues divided by number of transactions – have skyrocketed since 2018. So any comparison of crypto to the early days of the internet is nonsense.” Nouriel Roubini

“The Bitcoin bulls have finally managed to break through the psychological $4,000 mark. But let’s not get carried away as it’s what happens next that matters. For me, the question is whether Bitcoin can keep the momentum from here and overcome its recent struggle for direction.

As prices consolidate within narrowing ranges, the key resistance for a larger rally is near the $4,200 level, which Bitcoin has failed to break through this year despite testing the waters on a few occasions. If we see it going above $4,200 and convincingly staying above that level, that’s when we can talk about a more significant bearish-to-bullish trend.” Simon Peters, Market Analyst, eToro

“(Facebook’s reported stablecoin plans are) very, very positive in our view overall. The approach that we’ve taken is to create a consortium model. When we think about a standard for how fiat money works on the internet, it’s really critical that it’s an open standard that many companies can implement, that has an self-governance mechanism — [that provides] a technical standard as well as a membership framework.” Jeremy Allaire, Co-Founder and CEO, Circle

“Our blockchain projects are some of the most significant and cutting edge in the world, and we are just reaching the point where our products are being introduced to the public. In particular, tZERO brought live a security token trading platform. Our retail arm lost money last year because I gunned things in an attempt to create a conventional high-growth/money losing e-commerce business, but the losses were nauseating and we reverted back to the philosophy of profitability on which we built Overstock: as a result, in 2019 retail will return to profitability, generating a positive operating cash flow ≥ $10 million.” Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne

“Crypto is powerful. People want to connect and stuff, but if you actually pay people and things in value that is almost more significant.” Cameron Winklevoss