Washington, DC – On Saturday, Overstock’s CEO Patrick Byrne delivered a riveting keynote speech to the participants of this year’s Bitcoin in the Beltway conference.
In his much anticipated appearance, he announced that Overstock would be donating 3% of the company’s Bitcoin sales to organizations working to promote cryptocurrency throughout the world. He also admitted that he was quite cautious about integrating Bitcoin at first, but has been pleasantly surprised by the enthusiasm shown by customers.
Alternative Currencies
When an audience member asked whether he believed that in the future a select number of popular altcoins could serve as competing currencies, Byrne responded that he favors competing currencies in theory and feels like they could truly compete with Bitcoin as long as they offer superior technical features.
He then went on to acknowledge that the core Bitcoin code contains a lot of “slop,” which he speculated could cause potential logistical problems for Bitcoin in the future.
This mirrors the observations of Goldcoin (GLD) lead developer Amir Eslampanah who has been working tirelessly for the past year cleaning up the “slop” and rewriting the entire bitcoin core from scratch, which he plans to premier next month in the newest release of the Goldcoin client.
Byrne ended his speech by predicting that in 20 years no one would remember that anything other than cryptocurrency existed. If Mr. Byrne is correct, and so far he’s batting about a thousand, in the future consumers will be reaching for Bitcoin, Litecoin, and other alts, as legacy payment providers Mastercard and Visa become the VHS playing dinosaurs of the ancient past.
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