Professor Susan Athey: 'If People Use It, Bitcoin Has Intrinsic Value'
Susan Athey is a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economics Policy Research, specializing in auction-based marketplaces and the economics of the Internet. She is also an advisor at Ripple Labs and serves as Microsoft's Chief Economist. Athey brought an independent academic perspective to discussions at CoinSummit San Francisco last week, using her expertise and research to assess the technology's potential on many fronts. CoinDesk spoke to Athey about what gives bitcoin intrinsic value, the novelty of the Bitcoin protocol, possible scenarios for bitcoin's future, and the....
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Professor of economics at Stanford Graduate School of Business and senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economics Policy Research Susan Athey has been named to the board of directors of decentralized payment network provider Ripple Labs. Athey's areas of research include online media, advertising and search, and she notably spoke at the New York bitcoin hearings and at CoinSummit San Francisco about her involvement with digital currencies earlier this year. An authority on digital economics, mathematics and computer science, Athey previously served as an advisor to Ripple Labs. A....
Forbes technology writer Laura Shin recently conducted a three-part interview with Bitcoin enthusiast and Stanford business professor Susan Athey about her involvement with Bitcoin, including an experiment being conducted with MIT students. The purpose of the experiment is to determine whether permeation of Bitcoin is a determinant factor in its spread, which is to say, how much of Bitcoin's uphill battle is to do with the hurdles to acquiring it. By seeding an entire community with Bitcoin, we can test the hypothesis that it's lack of community adoption that's keeping people from using....
TechCrunch is currently hosting its Disrupt NY 2014 conference, spiced up with a hackathon and an interesting 'battle' between 30 startups. Of course, no disruptive tech event would be complete without digital currencies, so TechCrunch obliged. Ripple's Susan Athey and Blockchain's Peter Smith took to the stage at the event to share their thoughts on cryptocurrencies and the current state of bitcoin. Media obsession. Athey cautioned against the media's incessant focus on the bitcoin exchange rate. "I think the focus on the exchange rate is a little overrated. I mean it's fun to watch the....
Two economists and an entrepreneur weighed in on the troubles facing bitcoin and how to address them in a CoinSummit San Francisco. Panelists included Susan Athey, senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economics Policy Research. Jonathan Levin, co-founder of Coinometrics; and Andreas Antonopoulos, the Chief Security Officer of Blockchain. The session was moderated by Nathaniel Popper of The New York Times. Andreas Antonopoulos, Jonathan Levin, Susan Athey and Nathaniel Popper. The session was titled, "Is Bitcoin a Flash in the Pan?" but right off the bat, the panelists agreed that....
There is no shared opinion on whether bitcoins have intrinsic value or not. Some conservative-minded people believe that intrinsic value may only be possessed by seizable assets, although this obviously disregards such inseparable attributes of today’s realities as software or internet. Others assume that intrinsic value is the feature of such commodities as gold or silver because what matters is the way they are perceived and the history they have. The classic example, however, proves that a starving person would definitely attach more intrinsic value to a loaf of bread than to a piece of....