Barry Silbert was bullish on Bitcoin BSVeven in 2014

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Following the bankruptcy filing of Genesis Global Trading (and several of their subsidiaries), we should revisit the history of Genesis’ parent company: Digital Currency Group.

DCG is an investment incubator and conglomerate founded by Barry Silbert. During the 2017-2022 era, Silbert shifted to a heavily multi-chain and speculative/trade-based investment strategy to take advantage of frothy markets that led to incredible profits and ended in l one of the major failures of this bear market.

A few years ago, he spoke with a very different tune about bitcoin.

In 2014, Silbert gave an interview to NBC explaining why he was bullish on Bitcoin, and humorously, I agreed with all of his points! This is a great illustration of my perpetual and ongoing view that Bitcoin is unchanged in BSV, but uniquely different in BTC as a product of The Bitcoin Civil War.

Source: NBC News

It’s funny, it sounds like it could have been said by myself, the guys at Twetch, or even Craig Wright. Instead, Bitcoin has been hampered, Facebook is on its third iteration of digital currency, and the money and data silos in the social media space have only gotten worse in the meantime.

Too bad we didn’t adopt Bitcoin on Facebook in 2014!

Source: NBC News

Curious timing for Barry to bring this up because at the time most bitcoiners thought it was inevitable. Bitcoin was an amazing payment technology, and by 2023 we would probably have seen Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal adopt Bitcoin as the network on which they executed their payments.

However, less than a year after that interview, Silbert accepted money from Mastercard Ventures, which led DCG to invest in the creation of companies like Blockstream and Lightning Labs that were dedicated to hampering Bitcoin so that their solutions side chain and second layer could be marketed at the expense of bitcoin adoption.

Sorry internet trading, DCG took money from payment companies that had other plans for bitcoin! And everything happened very quickly in 2015, which is curious.

Source: TechCrunch Source: NBC News

This one is even sadder because global remittances were such an obvious use case for Bitcoin’s early adoption. Both MoneyGram and Western Union could have used bitcoin as liquidity, transmission, and settlement of global funds anytime in the last 10 years, and it would have worked like a charm.

Instead, due to the Bitcoin Civil War, Ripple entered into a deal with MoneyGram to offer their centralized (and partnered with DCG) RippleNet solution which ultimately failed and was deprecated in 2021 with a brief press release.

Source: Ripple

Moreover, not only have MoneyGram and Western Union persisted in the void Bitcoin left open, but in the meantime we have seen the rise of Venmo, Zelle, WeChat, and countless national and regional payment and money transfer grow worldwide.

Source: NBC News

For the last entry, I once again agree with Silbert. It’s unfortunate, but because of his hesitations on Bitcoin, he made no progress towards achieving these goals. Instead, his portfolio companies have placed a heavy emphasis on margin trading, lending, borrowing, yield farming, and custodial services for the crypto casino economy.

People like me continue to focus on Silbert’s original Bitcoin vision. It was really Satoshis Vision when we were all bitcoiners, and it’s only in BSV that we work on these big challenges in global finance.

The sad thing is that now we mostly do it alone and under public scrutiny on the assumption that Bitcoin was never intended for micropayments.

What happened to you, Barry?

Read the original interview here.

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