After being bombarded with requests for weeks, we Have caved in and made a Freakonomics Radio podcast on bitcoin. The episode is known as Why people who do not despise bitcoin love it. Bitcoin is much more interesting than that and larger. Bitcoin is described as virtual gold and everything from a ponzi scheme to a haven for people to purchase black-market products. However, what animates some folks, such as Silicon Valley veteran Marc Andreessen, is Bitcoin’s likely to underlie numerous trades, well the swapping of money. Andreessen Netscape And is currently on the board of businesses such as eBay and Facebook. He is not a disinterested observer from the bitcoin discussion: His investment capital company Andreessen Horowitz has spent in just two businesses like 50 million, like Coinbase, and Andreessen says his company plans to spend more to ease bitcoin to go mainstream.

Why that much confidence? The reason, Andreessen informs our own Stephen Dubner, is since bitcoin is the answer to a basic problem in computer science. Among the things which have been missing on the web for 20 years is sort of a house notion of money, Andreessen clarifies. The ability to very easily pay someone online, the ability to really effortlessly charge for a bit of content, the ability to very easily swap a digital name, or a digital key, or a digital contract has just been missing as you have got no device for establishing trust. And so bitcoin typically holds the promise of being the first solution to establishing trust via an annotated network An economist at Stanford University Susan Athey that has a background in computer science is a huge advocate from the technology behind bitcoin. For Athey, bitcoin’s control has to do with its simplicity: The beauty of a new currency that is part of a digital money protocol is that what I’m moving from me to you is only an entry on a protected, public ledger. And a pair of computers talking to one another sustains that ledger.

A flip side, is clear to the Simplicity affords. New York Superintendent of Financial Services Benjamin Lawsky, who’s spearheading the charge to control the electronic currency bitcoin converter, tells Dubner he is concerned on the liberty bitcoin affords to offenders: It is very tough to transport one million in hard money abroad. You get it onto a plane and cannot simply put it. But it is quite easy to do that now using bitcoin. That said Lawsky is motivated about the Chances of a technology such as bitcoin, which could bring all kinds of transaction fees down. This might be bad news for banks, credit card companies and other middlemen that are fee-seeking.