100 Crypto Quotes - The Good, the Bold and the Ugly

The Good - The founders, developers, early adopters and an assortment of innovative characters.

1. “If you don’t believe it or don’t get it, I don’t have the time to try to convince you, sorry.” Satoshi Nakamoto

2. “I see Bitcoin as ultimately becoming a reserve currency for banks, playing much the same role as gold did in the early days of banking. Banks could issue digital cash with greater anonymity and lighter weight, more efficient transactions.” Hal Finney, early Bitcoin contributor.

3. “Whereas most technologies tend to automate workers on the periphery doing menial tasks, blockchains automate away the center. Instead of putting the taxi driver out of a job, blockchain puts Uber out of a job and lets the taxi drivers work with the customer directly.” Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum

4. “If the cryptocurrency market overall or a digital asset is solving a problem, it’s going to drive some value.” Brad Garlinghouse, Ripple Labs

5. “Whenever the price of cryptocurrency is rallying, people start spending a lot more.” Erik Voorhees, Shapeshift.io

6. “We are seeing more managed money and, to an extent, institutional money entering the [crypto] space. Anecdotally speaking, I know of many people who are working at hedge funds or other investment managers who are trading cryptocurrency personally, the question is, when do people start doing it with their firms and funds?” Olaf Carlson-Wee, Polychain Capital

7. “I am very excited about the prospect of using cryptocurrency, not just as a money equivalent, but using it as a way to earn something as a result of doing some type of work.” William Mougayar, Author

8. “I love seeing new services constantly starting to accept Bitcoin. Bitcoin is really becoming “the currency of the Internet.” I’m most concerned by possible government reactions to Bitcoin. They can’t destroy Bitcoin, but they could really slow things down by making exchange much more difficult.” Michael Marquardt, Bitcoin.org

9. “Bitcoin is here to stay. There would be a hacker uproar to anyone who attempted to take credit for the patent of cryptocurrency. And I wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of hacker fury.” Adam Draper, CEO Boost

10. “I am very intrigued by Bitcoin. It has all the signs. Paradigm shift, hackers love it, yet it is described as a toy. Just like microcomputers.” Paul Graham, Y combinator

11. “Blockchain is the tech. Bitcoin is merely the first mainstream manifestation of its potential.” Marc Kenigsberg, Bitcoin chaser

12. “As the value goes up, heads start to swivel and skeptics begin to soften. Starting a new currency is easy, anyone can do it. The trick is getting people to accept it because it is their use that gives the “money” value.” Adam B. Levine, journalist Coindesk

13. “Bitcoin will do to banks what email did to the postal industry.” Rick Falkvinge, Pirate Party

14. “Bitcoin is a technological tour de force.” Bill Gates, Microsoft

15. “As the value goes up, heads start to swivel and skeptics begin to soften. Starting a new currency is easy, anyone can do it. The trick is getting people to accept it, because it is their use that gives the “money” value.” Adam B. Levine, Let’s Talk Bitcoin, CEO at Tokenly

16. “[Bitcoin] is a remarkable cryptographic achievement… The ability to create something which is not duplicable in the digital world has enormous value…Lot’s of people will build businesses on top of that.” Eric Schmidt, Business and Software engineer.

17. “PayPal had these goals of creating a new currency. We failed at that, and we just created a new payment system. I think Bitcoin has succeeded on the level of a new currency, but the payment system is somewhat lacking. It’s very hard to use, and that’s the big challenge on the Bitcoin side.” Peter Thiel, PayPal

18. “Bitcoin actually has the balance and incentives center, and that is why it is starting to take off.” Julian Assange, Wikileaks

19. “Bitcoin is the beginning of something great: a currency without a government, something necessary and imperative.” Nassim Taleb, Mathematician.

20. “Bitcoin, and the ideas behind it, will be a disrupter to the traditional notions of currency. In the end, currency will be better for it.” Edmund Moy, 38th Director of the United States Mint

21. “Right now Bitcoin feels like the Internet before the browser.” Wences Casares, Xapo Bank

22. “[Bitcoin] is a very exciting development, it might lead to a world currency. I think over the next decade it will grow to become one of the most important ways to pay for things and transfer assets.” Kim Dotcom, CEO of MegaUpload

23. “The Federal Reserve simply does not have authority to supervise or regulate Bitcoin in any way.” Janet Yellen, former chair of the US Federal Reserve

24. “EVERY informed person needs to know about Bitcoin because it might be one of the world’s most important developments.” Leon Louw, two-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee

25. “Bitcoin may be the TCP/IP of money.” Paul Buchheit, creator Gmail

26. “Cryptocurrency is everything you don’t know about technology and everything you don’t know about finances”. John Oliver, comedian

27. “It’s gold for nerds.” Stephan Colbert, Comedian

28. “If [Bitcoin does] not [reach $500.000 by the end of 2020], I will eat my d*ck on national television.” John McAfee, McAfee antivirus

29. “I understand the political ramifications of [bitcoin] and I think that the government should stay out of them and they should be perfectly legal.” Ron Paul, Republican Texas Congressman and former candidate for US President

30. “I think the fact that within the bitcoin universe an algorithm replaces the functions of [the government] is actually pretty cool. I am a big fan of Bitcoin.”Al Gore, 45th Vice President of the United States

31. “Cryptocurrency is such a powerful concept that it can almost overturn governments.” Charles Lee, Creator of Litecoin

32. “The reason we are all here is that the current financial system is outdated.” Charlie Shrem – founder & CEO Bitinstant

33. “There are 3 eras of currency: Commodity based, politically based, and now, math-based.” Chris Dixon, Hunch

34. “At their core, cryptocurrencies are built around the principle of a universal, inviolable ledger, one that is made fully public and is constantly being verified by these high-powered computers, each essentially acting independently of the others.” Paul Vigna, journalist WSJ

The Bold - These are the people who see the world through crypto coloured spectacles… and to be fair it is nothing if not spectacular.

1. “Bitcoin is Cash with Wings.” Charlie Shrem, Entrepreneur

2. “Bitcoin is Money Over Internet Protocol.” Tony Gallippi, Bitpay

3. “Innovations are very cruel by nature. They destroy the old ones to create space for themselves.” Sukant Ratnakar, Author

4. “One must acknowledge with cryptography no amount of violence will ever solve a math problem.” Jacob Appelbaum, Tor

5. “At its core, bitcoin is a smart currency, designed by very forward-thinking engineers. It eliminates the need for banks, gets rid of credit card fees, currency exchange fees, money transfer fees, and reduces the need for lawyers in transitions… all good things.” Peter Diamandis, XPrize foundation

6. “When I first heard about Bitcoin, I thought it was impossible. How can you have a purely digital currency? Can’t I just copy your hard drive and have your bitcoins? I didn’t understand how that could be done, and then I looked into it and it was brilliant.” Jeff Garzik, developer and journalist

7. “The governments of the world have spent hundreds and hundreds of trillions of dollars bailing out a decaying, dickensian, outmoded system called banking when the solution to the future of finance is peer-to-peer. It’s going to be alternative currencies like Bitcoin and it’s not actually going to be a banking system as we had before 2008.” Patrick Young, Fintech, pioneer

8. “We have elected to put our money and faith in a mathematical framework that is free of politics and human error.” Tyler Winklevoss, Gemini Exchange

9. “Hey, obviously this is a very interesting time to be in Bitcoin center now, but if you guys want to argue over whether this is reality or not, one Bitcoin will feed over 40 homeless people in Pensacola center now. If you guys want proof Bitcoin is real, send them to me, I’ll cash them out and feed homeless people.” Jason King, Author

10. “The bitcoin world is this new ecosystem where it doesn’t cost that much to start a new Bitcoin company, it doesn’t cost much to start owning Bitcoin either, and it is a much more efficient way of moving money around the world.” Tim Draper, Venture Capitalist

11. “Bitcoin enables certain uses that are very unique. I think it offers possibilities that no other currency allows. For example the ability to spend a coin that only occurs when two separate parties agree to spend the coin; with a third party that couldn’t run away with the coin itself.” Pieter Wuille, Chainecode Labs

12. “Crypto is indefinable. That is its intrinsic value, that is its true wealth.” Christian Fletcher, artist and writer.

13. “It was the amateurs of cryptology who created the species. The professionals, who almost certainly surpassed them in cryptanalytic expertise, concentrated on down-to-earth problems of the systems that were then in use but are now outdated. The amateurs, unfettered to those realities, soared into the empyrean of theory.” David Kahn, Historian and Journalist

14. “Bitcoin is the currency of resistance.” Max Keiser, Broadcaster

15. “What can’t kill Bitcoin, makes it stronger.” Mark Wittkowski, Online Marketer

16. “You should be taking this technology as seriously as you should have been taking the development of the Internet in the early 1990’s.” Blythe Masters, Former JP Morgan

17. “DeFi boom is a very near equivalent of an apocalyptic event for the traditional financial institutions.” Mohith Agadi, Extreme Trade

18. “What affected me most profoundly was the realization that the sciences of cryptography and mathematics are very elegant, pure sciences. I found that the ends for which these pure sciences are used are less elegant.” Jim Sanborn, Sculptor

19. “Cryptography is the essential building block of independence for organizations on the Internet, just like armies are the essential building blocks of states because otherwise one state just takes over another.” Julian Assange

20. “Bitcoin was created to serve a highly political intent, a free and uncensored network where all can participate with equal access.” Amir Taaki, Anarchist Hacktivist

21. “Lots of people working in cryptography have no deep concern with real application issues. They are trying to discover things clever enough to write papers about.” Whitfield Diffie, creator public-key cryptography

22. “Trusted third parties are security holes.” Nick Szabo, legal scholar and cryptographer

23. “This [Bitcoin] may be the purest form of democracy the world has ever known, and I — for one — am thrilled to be here to watch it unfold.” Paco Ahlgren, Author

24. “Cryptography shifts the balance of power from those with a monopoly on violence to those who comprehend mathematics and security design.” Jacob Appelbaum, Wikipedia and Tor

25. “[Cryptourrencies] may hold long-term promise, particularly if the innovations promote a faster, more secure and more efficient payment system.” Ben Bernanke, Chair Federal Reserve

26. “Online identity and reputation will be decentralized. We will own the data that belongs to us.” William Mougayar, Author, The Business Blockchain

27. “It just identifies how much money laundering there is being done in the world. How much people are trying to move currencies from one place to another.” Larry Fink, BlackRock

28. “Gold is a great way to preserve wealth, but it is hard to move around. You do need some kind of alternative and Bitcoin fits the bill. I’m not surprised to see that happening.” Jim Rickards, Author, Currency Wars

29. “What we want is fully anonymous, ultra-low transaction cost, transferable units of exchange. If we get that going… the banks will become the obsolete dinosaurs they deserve to become.” Adam Back, Cypherpunk

30. “The blockchain is an incorruptible digital ledger of economic transactions that can be programmed to record not just financial transactions but virtually everything of value.” Don & Alex Tapscott, Blockchain Research Instituite

31. “[Bitcoin is] the biggest opportunity set we can think of over the next decade.” Bob Grifeld, NASDAQ chairman

Hal Finney Quotes

Hal Finney is one of the most popular Bitcoin believers. He was mining Bitcoin since the early days and many suspect that he might even have been Satoshi Nakamoto himself.

1. “Since we’re all rich with bitcoins … we ought to put some of this unearned wealth to good use.”

2. “Bitcoin seems to be a very promising idea. I like the idea of basing security on the assumption that the CPU power of honest participants outweighs that of the attacker. It is a very modern notion that exploits the power of the long tail.”

3. “The computer can be used as a tool to liberate and protect people, rather than to control them.”

Satoshi Nakamoto Quotes - The person(s) that created Bitcoin. We only know Satoshi by their screen name but their actual identity is a mystery, however we do know its definitely not Craig Wright.

1. Message in the Genesis block. “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.”

2. They are coming. “WikiLeaks has kicked the hornet’s nest, and the swarm is headed towards us.”

3. Lost coins “Lost coins only make everyone else’s coins worth slightly more.  Think of it as a donation to everyone.”

4. All or nothing. “In a few decades when the reward gets too small, the transaction fee will become the main compensation for [mining] nodes. I’m sure that in 20 years there will either be very large transaction volume or no volume.”

5. Decentralization wins. “A lot of people automatically dismiss e-currency as a lost cause because of all the companies that failed since the 1990’s. I hope it’s obvious it was only the centrally controlled nature of those systems that doomed them. I think this is the first time we’re trying a decentralized, non-trust-based system.”

6. Distributing Bitcoins “As computers get faster and the total computing power applied to creating bitcoins increases, the difficulty increases proportionally to keep the total new production constant. Thus, it is known in advance how many new bitcoins will be created every year in the future.”

7. Constant flow. “Coins have to get initially distributed somehow, and a constant rate seems like the best formula.”

8. Bloody hard. “Sorry to be a wet blanket. Writing a description for this thing for general audiences is bloody hard. There’s nothing to relate it to.”

9. Don’t trust third parties. “With e-currency based on cryptographic proof, without the need to trust a third party middleman, money can be secure and transactions effortless.”

10. Not for micropayments. “Bitcoin isn’t currently practical for very small micropayments.  Not for things like pay per search or per page view without an aggregating mechanism, not things needing to pay less than 0.01.  The dust spam limit is a first try at intentionally trying to prevent overly small micropayments like that.”

11. Generate all the addresses you want. “When you generate a new bitcoin address, it only takes disk space on your own computer (like 500 bytes).  It’s like generating a new PGP private key, but less CPU intensive because it’s ECC.  The address space is effectively unlimited.  It doesn’t hurt anyone, so generate all you want.”

12. Central banks. “The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that’s required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve.”

13. Zero bugs. “I keep a list of all unresolved bugs I’ve seen on the forum.  In some cases, I’m still thinking about the best design for the fix.  This isn’t the kind of software where we can leave so many unresolved bugs that we need a tracker for them.”

14. Alternative to credit cards. “Bitcoin would be convenient for people who don’t have a credit card or don’t want to use the cards they have.”

15. Bitcoin “Buy attack” “When someone tries to buy all the world’s supply of a scarce asset, the more they buy the higher the price goes. At some point, it gets too expensive for them to buy any more. It’s great for the people who owned it beforehand because they get to sell it to the corner at crazy high prices.”

16. Satoshi’s language. “It’s very attractive to the libertarian viewpoint if we can explain it properly. I’m better with code than with words though.”

17. “Sigh… why delete a wallet instead of moving it aside and keeping the old copy just in case? You should never delete a wallet.”

18. On Privacy “The possibility to be anonymous or pseudonymous relies on you not revealing any identifying information about yourself in connection with the bitcoin addresses you use. If you post your bitcoin address on the web, then you’re associating that address and any transactions with it with the name you posted under. If you posted under a handle that you haven’t associated with your real identity, then you’re still pseudonymous. For greater privacy, it’s best to use bitcoin addresses only once.”

19. A major battle in an even larger war. “We can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory of freedom for several years.”

20. On investing “It might make sense to get some in case it catches on”

21. In the future “I’m sure that in 20 years there will either be very large transaction volume or no volume.”

22. On Banking “The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that’s required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust.”

The Ugly - Then, of course, there are those that are not so fond of Bitcoin and it’s peers. These people seem to have taken a position against the world of crypto and make sure everyone knows about it.

1. “[Bitcoin is] worse than tulip bulbs.” Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan

2. “Stay away from it. It’s a mirage, basically. In terms of cryptocurrencies, generally, I can say almost with certainty that they will come to a bad ending.” Warren Buffett, legendary investor

3. “We know they can be used to finance terrorism, facilitate money laundering, and support malign activities that threaten U.S. national security interests and the integrity of the U.S. and international financial systems," Janet Yellen, US Senator

4. “Probably Rat poison squared” Warren Buffet, again.

5. “Avoid Bitcoin like the plague… There is nothing to support Bitcoin except the hope that you will sell it to someone for more than you paid for it.” Jack Bogle, Vanguard Founder

6. “This asset class is rife with fraud, scams, and abuse” Gary Gensler, SEC Chairman

7. “The hype, the volatility, the wild claims that turn out to be false. As the crypto market grows, so do the risks to our financial stability and our economy.” Elizabeth Warren, US Senator

8. “Instead of leaving our financial system at the whims of the giant bank, crypto puts the system at the whims of some shadowy, faceless group of super-coders and miners, which doesn’t sound better to me.” Elizabeth Warren

9. “Bitcoin is evil.” Paul Krugman, Nobel-prize winning economist

Sources include: https://coindiligent.com/interesting-quotes-satoshi-nakamoto https://paybis.com/blog/cryptocurrency-quotes/ https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/cryptocurrency

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