The founder and CEO of Overstock.com, Patrick Byrne, spoke about his enthusiastic support of blockchains and its revolutionary potential that rivals the invention of the internet.
“The blockchain revolution has a greater potential than anything we’ve seen in history. … It’s bigger than the Internet revolution, how it’s going to restructure society.”
When Byrne was asked why he continues to pursue blockchain innovation during the cryptocurrency bear market, he exclaimed that “what coins are doing on any given day is silly”. He pointed out that his company has invested in 19 blockchain companies so far and next year, around Q1, is when some of these blockchain products will start to emerge.
Bryne went on to describe some of the benefits that blockchain products can offer to the security industry such as “90 percent lower friction costs”, “complete transparency for regulators”, and “immunity from market manipulation”. His other investments range from Minds (a crypto-based social platform), t0 (crypto-based trading platform), GrainChain (blockchain for agriculture), and many more.
Vested interest in future development
Patrick Bryne announced his interest in blockchain technology a few years ago and formed Medici Ventures as a wholly owned subsidiary of Overstock.com. Furthermore, Bryne has announced plans to sell the retail division of Overstock.com in early 2019 to focus more time on the blockchain sector. These investment moves have shifted his financial incentives to blockchain giving him “skin in the game”, as venture capitalist like to refer to, since there is greater motivation to succeed when there is sizable personal rewards for success and sizable personal penalties for failure.
Within the Dash ecosystem, Masternodes also serve a similar purpose by being a source of vested interest so their respective operators take significant interest in the well-being and improvement of the Dash network. Masternodes must stake 1,000 Dash, which constitutes an investment of around $82,000 USD, currently, but was over $1 million USD when Dash’s price peaked last year. Both are no small investments, which motivates the Masternode operators to properly secure the Dash blockchain by acting honestly and running Masternodes on high quality equipment. Masternode operators are also incentivized to properly vote for which proposals to fund with the Dash Treasury’s funds, which are 10% of each month’s block rewards. In return for providing these services, they not only work towards increasing the value of Dash and thus their investment, but are also currently compensated with around 6.7% per annum.
Dash making blockchain revolution a reality
Dash is taking some of the first steps to create the blockchain revolution by leveraging its unique structure to create technological and adoption advancements. A major hurdle towards wider usage of cryptocurrency and blockchain is making it secure and easy to use. Dash is doing this with ChainLocks to further protect against 51% attacks, Automatic InstantSend to make transactions as fast as consumers are already used to without additional fees, and a simple to use interface with Evolution. Furthermore, Dash is pushing ahead with global adoption, which makes it easier for consumers to spend their Dash at more than 4,200 merchants, which includes Overstock.com and also earning Dash by shopping through Rewards.com.
As Byrne mentioned, blockchain has enormous potential to reshape society, but it is still in its infant days and needs sizable refinement to be usable by average consumers. Dash has demonstrates a commitment and ability to work towards that refinement by utilizing its DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) and Masternodes to not only be financially incentivized to take care of the network, but to also govern and improve the network.
