Investor Michael Terpin On Bitcon Consumer Adoption: “The Consumer Market Is Responding”
Well-known Bitcoin investor Michael Terpin believes Bitcoin is now at the point in its evolution where Bitcoin firms can reach out directly to the consumer, citing Purse.io as an example of success in this pursuit.
“I think now we are the moment in Bitcoin where enough of the infrastructure has been built up we can serve the consumer,” Terpin said. “In January 2014, I said at a conference that you could not have the Google of Bitcoin until you have the Yahoo, and you can’t have the Netscape until you have the Cisco. Cisco is the mining equipment and brick-and-mortar of the Bitcoin system.” In Terpin’s opinion, Bitcoin has evolved in numerous ways quickly, allowing for Bitcoin to start reaching out to the consumer.
“Today we are dramatically further ahead in terms of quality of wallets and security and Two-Factor Authentication and multi-signature. This is all the stuff that didn’t exist or was very nascent when I first got into Bitcoin in the first part of 2013,” Terpin said.
“We’re now at the point with companies like Purse.io and some other companies that are beginning to touch the consumer market and the consumer marketplace is responding and are having success.” So, for that reason, Terpin feels its time.
Terpin is in the process of launching an incubator in his hometown, Las Vegas. The incubator is called bCommerce Labs and is in the early stages of development.
“We’ve just started raising money. It is a foundry style incubator so its not an accelerator,” Terpin told CCN.com.
These are my ideas and my tech partner Jim Blasko’s ideas.
Blasko has been working in the cryptocurrency space since 2009. Blasko and Terpin met last year and immediately identified as kindred spirits.
“We got along the way David Johnston and I did when we founded BitAngels,” Terpin told me at CoinCongress 2015 in San Francisco. “Sometimes you just meet somebody and you can make 1+1=3 and do some great stuff together.”
The pair is hoping to launch two or three companies a year out of bCommerce Labs, all of which will be their own ideas. Blasko will take the lead on the ideas he brings to the project while Terpin will take the lead on the ideas which he brings forth.
“It is similar to what Bill Gross did with Idealab,” Terpin told me. “He went into the Internet in 1996 and thought, ‘I have all of these great ideas, and I can’t execute them all at once so I will bring people into run them all.”
Idealab was one of the most successful business propositions of all the time, Terpin told me. It gave rise to Overture and CitySearch, the latter of which merged with Ticketmaster and went public.
“We have thirty companies that have come up with ideas and our investors in the incubators welcome and decide the best way to go forward is,” he said.
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