But over the past year, Binance has matured and begun to offer more formalized services. ATHEY: I think of Bitcoin as really a revolutionary new technology that is in some ways way past due. ATHEY: One is the remittance market. The MACD is an oscillator that uses two moving averages to show the momentum of a market. DUBNER: So it sounds to me like you’re saying the uses of Bitcoin being so wide and deep that we should all appreciate it, or at least appreciate the potential of it. DUBNER: (laughs) Do your best. ANDREESSEN: (laughs). I will, I’ll admit to that much. ANDREESSEN: (laughs) You know, I’m from the Midwest. You know, one of the huge problems of the Internet over 20 years is who do you trust, which websites do you trust, which people do you trust when you do a transaction, who do you trust? Like Tinkerbell, who exists because you believe in her, Bitcoin has value because enough people believe it has value. These schemes used false promises and deceptive marketing to trick people into investing significant quantities of money, resulting in widespread financial devastation for many naïve investors. One of the things as a consequence that’s been missing on the Internet for 20 years is kind of a native concept of money, right?

I’ve been using the Internet for years to pay people online, to carry out all kinds of transactions. And so, the ability to very easily pay somebody online, the ability to very easily charge for a piece of content, the ability to very easily exchange a digital title, or a digital key, or a digital contract has just been missing because you have no mechanism for establishing trust. A user can refer to the exchange platform for others with their referral code, and this enables the user to earn referral rewards. It can be used that way. Or is that not the way this problem could have been solved? ANDREESSEN: At the core of what Bitcoin is the solution to a fundamental problem in computer science that’s been around for decades that had never been solved before… That’s Susan Athey. She’s an economist at Stanford - she also studied computer science - and she’s an adviser to Ripple, another virtual currency, which is a Bitcoin rival. The blockchain that Andreessen just mentioned is what Susan Athey was describing earlier as a "public ledger." It is a log of all transactions in the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Although the complete blockchain is not needed all at once since it is possible to run in pruning mode. And so if you have a payment system like Bitcoin where you don’t have the credential exchange, and you have no risk of identity fraud and you have no risk of people being able to run transactions on your credit card after the fact, you can basically eliminate that entire category of fraud. It is a Layer-2 payment protocol built on Bitcoin and designed to improve scalability and transaction throughput. When a transaction is verified, a new block is opened, and a Bitcoin is created and given as a reward to the miner(s) who verified the data within the block-they are then free to use it, hold it, or sell it. Instead, use a hardware wallet like Trezor https://youtu.be or Ledger that stores your private key and is unreachable by hackers. You can access your wallet from top menu on the home page of your Binance account. Users can also transfer Bitcoin to other people and pay with Bitcoin for purchases from a very limited number of businesses.

That is why many Craigslist users suggest meeting in a public area. The announcements follow a public spat between Binance and WazirX over the weekend when the companies began to argue about the ownership of the Indian firm. ANDREESSEN: Some of that business will be transactions, some of that business will be digital contracts, some of that business will be digital keys, digital signatures and then the system will start to work itself into things like antifraud, or things like public payments, or things like micropayments. DUBNER: OK, and before that, and before that, and before that, you were doing things like helping build the first browser that a lot of us who got on the Internet when it was new started to use, Netscape Navigator. The data shows that the majority of Bitcoin is held by those who treat it as digital gold: an asset to be held for the long term. The largest digital tokens including Bitcoin slid about 3 percent after the disclosure, then recovered most of the drop. And the fees can be around 10 percent.