The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
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Armstrong: Nearly every startup will integrate cryptocurrency within ten years
“And now, you know, I think the same thing is going to happen with cryptocurrency where in five or 10 years, pretty much every startup that gets created, it's going to use the internet, it's going to use AI, and it's also going to use some form of cryptocurrenc…”
Armstrong: One billion people will use open finance within 20 years
“There's a billion people using the open financial system on a daily basis, and, you know, I think that could be done in five years, like, without a lot of hard work, it could be 10 years, 20 years.”
Armstrong: Every investor should own one Bitcoin to learn about cryptocurrency
“Should every investor own maybe one Bitcoin? Yes, I think they should. And the reason is not so much as an investment. It's to start learning about this technology Which will be a major influence on finance in the future.”
Armstrong: Bitcoin-native applications will create multi-billion dollar companies
“So, these are very small today, but I think in the future some of these will end up being many multi-billion dollar companies and systems.”
Armstrong: Bitcoin will be the sole currency used on the blockchain
“I think Bitcoin will be the currency that, that everyone ends up using on the blockchain, and they probably don't quite understand what they're saying when they say that.”
Armstrong: Bitcoin usage will invert to 80% payments and 20% speculation
“And I think over time what'll happen is that those two percentages will shift. The 80% will end up becoming the 20% speculative asset, and it'll be 80% payment network actually happening.”
Armstrong: Bitcoin is the only way to build global, permissionless prediction markets
“Or if you want to build a global crowdfunding site, or a prediction market, or something like that, where people all over the world without having to register can, within a couple seconds, put money into this thing, or see it tip, It's like literally the only …”
Armstrong: Mainstream merchants like Starbucks will eventually accept Bitcoin
“Now, someday, if the world, if Bitcoin becomes more and more popular, like we all think it will then yes, even the Starbucks across the street will be accepting Bitcoin, because they still don't want to pay two percent, they'd rather pay a fraction of one perc…”
Armstrong: Centralized national digital currencies miss the entire point of cryptocurrency
“I am skeptical of countries like Ecuador saying they're going to create their own digital currency, since if you centralize a digital currency, it seems to miss the whole point in my book.”
Armstrong: Crypto won't have one dominant protocol, but several competing standards
“I think, ah, you know, now I think of it as a slightly different mental model, so it's not TCP IP that's one protocol to rule them all. There's gonna be a couple of these, you know, like Visa, MasterCard, Discover, or GIF, JPEG, PNG, if you wanna use an intern…”
Armstrong: Next wave of crypto adoption comes from earning, not buying
“So I think most of those people in the world, they don't have, you know, disposable income to kind of invest in risky new technologies. They're going to get crypto for the first time by, you know, completing some task or job because they want to earn money or,…”
Armstrong: Digital natives will value online identities over physical locations
“And I think it'll flip at some point where it's like this mentality shift of, you know, am I, are you first is, you know, people have all different types of identities, right? Is my primary identity you know, the school I went to, like, you know, this military…”
Armstrong: 90% of 2018 crypto activity is investment and speculation
“I think still 90% of what people are doing with crypto is investment or speculation, and that's great as an initial way to get people's interest into crypto, but it's more interesting to think about, you know, the utility phase, which is this 10%”
Armstrong: Future generations will never own traditional checkbook bank accounts
“There's going to be this whole generation of kids that grow up, and their phone is the only bank account they've ever known. They're never going to have a bank account in the way we think of it with a checkbook or something like that”
Armstrong: Greek government misunderstands blockchain when proposing state cryptocurrency
“If the Greek government is talking about Making some kind of their own currency and having on a blockchain. I think they don't really understand what blockchain means when they say that.”
Armstrong: Developing world's first bank accounts will be mobile crypto wallets
“And we think a whole generation of kids and people in the developing world will actually grow up, and their very first quote unquote bank account will actually be a digital currency wallet on their cell phone.”
Armstrong: Bitcoin GitHub repositories outpace traditional payment systems like PayPal
“There's about 6000 total to date, which is outpacing the number of GitHub repositories for other common payment systems like PayPal.”
Armstrong: Blockchain is for asset tokenization, not custom currencies
“When I hear people talking about creating all sorts of other currencies and putting it on the blockchain, I'm always, I'm a little bit skeptical of that. I think what they're talking about really is like, you can digitize any various types of assets and transf…”
Armstrong: Bitcoin is a global value protocol as big as the internet
“The Internet was such a transformative thing in society. It's this global decentralized protocol for moving information around. But here was another protocol that was also global and decentralized, but it was for moving value around, or money. And I remember t…”
Armstrong plans to scale Coinbase and run a public company
“For me, I actually want to be a CEO, run a business, have it be enormous, like, I'd like to run a public company someday”
Armstrong: Mainstream crypto adoption requires scalability, stablecoins, and better dev tools
“It's like, we've got to get the scalability of the networks up. The volatility of the coins probably needs to come down, or stable coins, which is like this whole, you know, area of research happening right now with like a dozen teams is going to be a really g…”
Armstrong: Only 40 million people worldwide own cryptocurrency in 2018
“I mean, so there, there's only about forty million people in the world today who have a little bit of crypto, and most of them have gotten into it by buying a little bit as an investment.”
Armstrong: Volatility is a feature for investors but a bug for payments
“Volatility is actually a feature if you want to be an investor, but it's a bug if you want to just have a medium of exchange.”
Armstrong: Open financial networks will expand global economic freedom and property rights
“We think that's going to bring about all kinds of benefits for the world, you know, a lot of innovation, quality of opportunity, economic freedom, strong property rights for people all over the world.”
Armstrong: 90% of global capital resides in institutional hands
“90% of the capital out there is actually in institutions”
Armstrong: Coinbase custodies $10B+ of cryptocurrency
“And we actually custody a lot of crypto, you know, ten billion or more of crypto”
Armstrong: Global payment systems are non-innovative, expensive national oligopolies
“It's this patchwork quilt of different countries. They all have their own proprietary system for pay-ins and pay-outs, and they don't really have an incentive to innovate. It's like a little oligopoly in each country with high fees and slow movement of funds a…”
Armstrong: Strong Developer Traction Signals 5-10 Year Platform Growth
“If you look at traditionally things that have gotten a lot of developer interest like Linux or Android or whatever it sometimes takes five years or 10 years, but they eventually end up being massive platforms.”
Armstrong: Bitcoin volatility decreased every year for three years
“We've seen volatility drop every year for the last three years.”
Armstrong: I am long Bitcoin and dollar-cost average my purchases
“Personally, yes, I'm long Bitcoin. I buy Bitcoin. I, I'm not too concerned about the price day to day. I tend to dollar cost, average it over a long period of time.”
Armstrong: Irrecoverable password loss is a non-starter for crypto revolution
“If people forget their password and all their money's gone, that's kind of a non-starter for a real financial revolution to happen.”
Armstrong: Bitcoin mainstream adoption will be gradual, not a single breakthrough
“Is there going to be some moment where bitcoin just suddenly is mainstream? No, I don't think so. I think it's going to be, you know, a series of lots of small things that happen over time.”
Armstrong: Bitcoin's sidechain upgrade mechanism ensures long-term survival
“It's a very high-risk upgrade because a lot of those things haven't been tested at scale before, and so it's really awesome to see Bitcoin have a mechanism for upgrades essentially built into it, which gives me a lot more confidence that it'll survive the test…”
Armstrong: Coinbase suffered 25% employee turnover during 2014-2015 crypto winter
“We had probably 25% turnover that year”
Armstrong: Startup hype fades within three years amid constant early setbacks
“The first two or three years of any startup is just setback after setback and nothing works. And within three years, that thing that was hot won't be hot anymore.”
Armstrong: Adding more coins is Coinbase's top customer request
“Actually, the number one request we get from our customers is, hey, there's more coins that I want to start trading.”
Armstrong: Two to three billion cell phone owners are unbanked
“And there's something like two to three billion people in the world who have a cell phone, but do not have a bank account or credit card.”
Armstrong: Coinbase Has 7,000 Signed-Up App Developers
“We've had 7000 developers sign up on Coinbase to create apps, and we have one of the more popular developer platforms out there.”
Armstrong: Bitcoin daily transactions doubled from 50k to 100k in 12 months
“And that's gone from about 50,000 a day to a 100,000 a day in the last 12 months.”