Quotes from Fred Ehrsam

Just as the Internet brought the cost of disseminating information down by an order of magnitude, bitcoin brings the cost of transferring ownership down by an order of magnitude.

Bitcoin's value is the same: It will remain as long as it is the most efficient mechanism for transferring ownership.

Forks often arise from differences of opinion in the direction of a project. And tokens are increasingly a mechanism for voting on changes to their protocols. Since the point of a fork is to try a new path, the new fork may not want to port all of the prior holders opposed to trying the new path the fork was created to take.

Not having sub-governance would be like anyone who owns USD being able to walk into a Google shareholder meeting and voting without owning Google stock just because Google shares happen to be denominated in USD.

At the end of the day, what's going to make bitcoin successful is more people making more interesting things, just like the beginning of the Internet.

Ethereum will be a first-class citizen on Coinbase.

To create an open protocol which helps coordinate resources towards a common goal, the resources need to be known at some level in the same way a lot of of data on the web needs to be public for it to be traversable and useful.

Sales conducted on-chain through smart contracts couldn't really be done before Ethereum, which is why they are a newer concept. I think this style will become the most common over time.

There is nothing that Bitcoin can do which Ethereum can't. While Ethereum is less battle-tested, it is moving faster, has better leadership, and has more developer mindshare.

While it may seem scarier in the earlier days, I think ultimately the blockchain creates a safer world.

The ability to easily buy and sell Bitcoin has been a really key factor in accelerating Bitcoin adoption.

Bitcoin is inherently international, and one of its great promises is it enables cross-border payments in a more efficient way.

We are on our way to blockchains as the fabric of society - the system for what we own (assets), who we are (identity), how we make decisions (governance), and more in an increasingly digital world. It's going to be a wild ride.

At GDAX, we want to see new protocols and their tokens flourish.

I think it's fundamentally a good sign that more and more professional traders and market makers are providing liquidity to the whole ecosystem. It allows people to move much larger quantities of digital currency more quickly than they would if that were not the case.

For the foreseeable future, I'm all about building blockchain-based decentralized services.

People far too often associate derivatives markets with mere speculation, but there are very legitimate businesses that need derivatives to protect themselves against risk.

Blockchains are digital organisms. As organisms evolve through changes in their DNA, blockchain protocols evolve through changes in their code. And like biological organisms, the most adaptive blockchains will be the ones that survive and thrive.

There's been a myth perpetuated where people think, 'I need to go into consulting, banking, finance, law, or medicine to make a consistently reasonable amount of money.' People are now realizing that's not the case.

When the actual Bitcoin network launched in 2009, no one knew about it, and many of those who did thought it would surely fail. Just to make sure the thing worked, the scripting language in Bitcoin was intentionally extremely restrictive.

As with early internet startups, some token models don't make sense. For every 1 huge hit, there will be 3 minor successes and 100 failures, so we shouldn't be surprised when some fail.

I'd guess blockchains will be the full-blown backbone of virtual worlds - the system for currency, assets, identity, even governance - before doing the same in the 'real world.' Which is where I think we will end up in the real world eventually; it's just a matter of which goes first and how long until it's the case for both.

Make no mistake - Ethereum would never have existed without Bitcoin as a forerunner. That said, I think Ethereum is ahead of Bitcoin in many ways and represents the bleeding edge of digital currency.

When Coinbase was starting, we thought we were seeing the birth of something that was really important - what I would almost describe as the future fabric of society - the system for who we are - our identities, what we own, our assets.