Jeremy Gardner: 'Bitcoin Is No Different Than Money Systems Today, Except That It May Be Better'

You don't suddenly educate hundreds of millions or billions of people on the virtues of decentralization and libertarian values and then expect that it is going to make them want to use Bitcoin or use blockchain-based applications.

No. What you're going to do is create tools that people want in their lives that they don't have today.

If there was no Silk Road, if there was no reason for people to actually buy and use Bitcoin to buy drugs online, I'm not sure it would exist today.

It was only once individuals in the developed world actually had a purpose for acquiring these crypto tokens to exchange in commerce that Bitcoin achieved meaningful value - once people understood that Bitcoin allowed people to do something they could not do before.

For the two billion people in the world who have no access to financial services and the four billion that have limited access - that includes that initial two billion - that's what blockchain technology is made for.

You know, with remittance solutions today, trials today, about giving directly to folks such as this, but we've historically primarily been building the blockchain technology for the people that need it least: you and me, people in the United States, people in the West.And that's not where the blockchain technology is going to have its biggest impact.

Whether it's in the EU or U.S., even in Africa or East Asia, governments are getting behind trials of this technology to improve the lives of their people - sometimes for more authoritarian purposes, such as distributed ledger-based money in China and Russia - but overwhelmingly, governments have actually been a massive catalyst for the adoption of trials with this technology.

When people are forced to use it - because there's no longer cash, which is kind of a grey economy and a massive part of the global economy overall - once that economy disappears in its current form without cash, which will happen over the next 50-70 years, that's when we'll see mass adoption of cryptocurrencies - decentralized cryptocurrencies - as we know them today.

The media narrative has definitely driven people to put way too much of their money into crypto.

Well I'm saying, when we go to a cashless society, people will really have a use case, but using cash is almost always going to be better than using Bitcoin today.