Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong: Crypto Will Disrupt the Fringes of the Economy First
In a 45-minute long Ask Me Anything session conducted recently on YouTube, Coinbase CEO Brian Amstrong answered a lot of interesting questions, including questions about him personally. Like many of us, Armstrong says he was a nerdy kid growing up and was unpopular.
Imagine Brian Armstrong as a Nerdy Kid
He says his mother worked at IBM and the family had one of the earliest 486 models of computer, which he used to learn and experiment in technology. Primarily, Armstrong describes himself as a “nerd who likes to build things with technology.”
I was the kid who was trying to read a book or whatever while everybody was playing sports.
He addressed several other issues during the AMA, including the effect of trolls. Armstrong says that he has never been trolled by crypto people in real life. He thinks it’s part of internet culture for people to be salty online but friendly in person. Unsatisfied with his answer, he says:
How do you maintain your sanity in a world where the Internet exists is like a deeper topic.
Crypto Disruption Will Work Its Way in From The Fringe
Armstrong’s views on the future of crypto adoption are perhaps the highlight of the session, and he didn’t reveal them until the end. After talking about how he uses Bitcoin – he says he’s given dozens of people Bitcoin over the years, and in the early days it was as high as one whole BTC per person – Armstrong went into the adoption of cryptocurrency.
He describes payments as a wide range of things, with things like coffee being square in the middle. He doesn’t think crypto payments will disrupt small purchases first – in fact, he believes these will be the last type of payments for crypto to disrupt. Instead, Armstrong believes that crypto will work its way in “from the fringes.”