What have you done with Gemini to ensure I'm not "gox'd" out of my coins if I choose to use your service?
So we built from ground one with a security first mentality, our first 3 hires were security experts. Our chief security officer was the head of security for AirBNB, something like a 15 or 20B company so it's quite large. He also worked on Google Wallet and at Microsoft with the highly touted security group. We've used the best practices, multi-signature technology, hardware security modules, geographically distributed vault systems we've spent about a year and a half building state of the art both to prevent from external hacks and internal malfeasance and any type of errors. You know this has been the most important thing for us to think about. We take security really seriously and we recognize that security has been pretty much the downfall of Bitcoin companies before and we've tried to learn from that and build the best product possible.
What is in the immediate future for Bitcoin?
I think that right now bitcoin is like the Internet pre-broadband and it's pretty hard to imagine the Internet fulfilling the promise that it has over the past 20-25 years without that type of infrastructure development. And right now there's lots of companies like Gemini trying to build the bridges and tunnels and connect the island of bitcoin to the mainland of finance and bringing people into the system. I think using the Internet as an analogy, that's kind of where we are – we're pre-broadband and we think that building the infrastructure will be a big part of the growth of the bitcoin economy over the next year.
[...] the immediate future for bitcoin (at least in the U.S.) is regulated businesses – licensed businesses, like Gemini. It's impossible to totally see the future but if you look back to the early days of the Internet, I feel like we're in the first or second inning of bitcoin so it's almost like 1993 or 1994 so there is tremendous potential and we think it's just the beginning.
Do you expect institutional investors to bring a large influx of new money into the bitcoin market?
We definitely believe that institutional investors will be bringing capital into the bitcoin system over time – it's unclear whether that will be overnight, but it's definitely moving in that direction and one of the things that we did in applying for a trust company charter is we went that route because it gives us a unique ability to work with institutions as a fiduciary. And what that basically means is that we're obligated to put their interests first and foremost and so that was a big step for us in order to engage the institutional community and bring them into bitcoin. So I think the short answer is yes.
What gov restrictions are keeping Gemini from being available in every state?
So Gemini is currently operational in 26 states and in Washington, D.C. – we're working hard to be open and operational in all 50 states, but each state has their various different requirements so there's no one-size fits all or answer to all 50 states, so we're approaching them as they come. Some states for example will require Gemini to file as a money transmitter, but that was something we couldn't do until we were licensed in New York – so there's contingencies around our approval in various states. And that's part of the system of Federalism that we're dealing with, but suffice to say we hope to be operational in all of the U.S. as soon as possible.
There is a lot more, too much to put into this single post. Feel free to go over to the AMA on reddit to read the full post there.Do you have any thoughts about the ugly contention that's been going on the last several months in the Bitcoin dev community over hardforking to relax the blocksize cap?
We're definitely watching the block size debate, I don't have a super strong opinion, I think everyone agrees that the block size in some way or another should increase and will have to increase in order for Bitcoin to fulfill its promise. We're keeping a close watch, I think its really interesting how the community's is proposing things and it's working in a very democratic process and people are free to propose things and obviously it's a consensus-based system. I think we're seeing that at play and it'll be exciting and interesting to see it unfold. I think that Bitcoin will get through this, it's weathered a lot already and I think its here to stay. I think its just one more of those things we'll get through.
