After Genesis Global Trading (and a number of its subsidiaries) filed for bankruptcy, let’s revisit the story of Genesis’ parent company, Digital Currency Group.
DCG is an incubator and investment conglomerate founded by Barry Silbert. In the 2017-2022 era, Silbert switched to a heavily multi-chain and speculation/trading investment strategy to capitalize on the bubbly markets, resulting in incredible gains and ending in one of the biggest bankruptcies of this bear market.
Just a few years earlier, he was speaking 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! It is a great illustration of my abiding and ongoing point that Bitcoin is unchanged in BSV but is markedly different in BTC as a product of the Bitcoin Civil War.
Source: NBC News
Funny, that sounds like I could have said it, the guys from Twetch or even Craig Wright. Instead, Bitcoin has been hampered, Facebook is in its 3rd iteration of the digital currency, and both money and data silos on social media have only gotten worse in the meantime.
Too bad we didn’t launch Bitcoin on Facebook in 2014!
Source: NBC News
Strange timing for Barry to bring this up as most bitcoiners at the time thought it was inevitable. Bitcoin was an incredible payment technology, and by 2023 we likely would have seen Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal adopt Bitcoin as the network they use to process their payments.
However, less than a year after that interview, Silbert accepted money from Mastercard Ventures, which led to DCG investing in the creation of companies like Blockstream and Lightning Labs, dedicated to disrupting Bitcoin so that its sidechain and “second layer” Solutions could be commercialized to the detriment of bitcoin adoption.
Sorry “trading on the web”, DCG took money from payment companies that had other plans for bitcoin! And in 2015 everything happened very quickly – which is strange.
Source: TechCrunch
Source: NBC News
This one is particularly sad because global remittance was such an obvious use case for Bitcoin’s early adoption. Both MoneyGram and Western Union could have used Bitcoin for liquidity, transfer and settlement of global funds at any point in the last 10 years and it would have worked brilliantly.
Instead, due to the bitcoin civil war, Ripple struck an agreement with MoneyGram to offer their centralized (and DCG partnership) RippleNet solution, which ultimately failed and was deprecated with a brief press release in 2021.
Source: Ripple
Furthermore, MoneyGram and Western Union have not only existed in the vacuum left by Bitcoin, but in the meantime we have seen the rise of Venmo, Zelle, WeChat and myriad national and regional payment and remittance solutions around the world.
Source: NBC News
I have to agree with Silbert on the last entry. It’s unfortunate, but because of his chatter about bitcoin, he hasn’t made any progress toward those goals. Its portfolio companies have instead placed a heavy emphasis on margin trading, lending, borrowing, yield farming, and custodial services for the crypto-casino economy.
People like me remain focused on Silbert’s originally stated vision of Bitcoin. It was truly Satoshi’s vision when we were all Bitcoiners and only at BSV do we work on these grand challenges in global finance.
The saddest part is that now we mostly do it alone and under public scrutiny, assuming bitcoin was never intended for micropayments.
What happened to you Barry?
Read the original interview here.
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