Travis Jank: Bitcoin and the 21st Century Gold Rush

Travis Jank’s inter­est in cryp­tocur­ren­cy, exchang­ing mon­ey through encrypt­ed trans­ac­tions, is an evo­lu­tion of his ear­li­er inter­ests.

“I’ve been into over­clock­ing com­put­ers for a while, which is tak­ing the fastest, newest tech­nol­o­gy and push­ing it to its out­er lim­its by cool­ing it with liq­uid nitro­gen,” Jank said. “The com­put­ers need for cryp­tocur­ren­cy, like bit­coin, are extreme­ly fast and pow­er­ful so I start­ed learn­ing about it in 2009 and it kind of took off from there.”

Jank will be shar­ing his inter­est in bit­coin and what he sees in its poten­tial at his TEDxSalem talk Sat­ur­day, Sept. 13.

To under­stand the rise of bit­coin, Jank sug­gest tak­ing a look back into the era of the Cal­i­for­nia gold rush.

“They did­n’t just allow one com­pa­ny to buy up all the land and start min­ing. They said, ‘It’s here, come and stake your claim,’” Jank said. “Bit­coin start­ed in sort of the same way, it was cre­at­ed with the idea that any­one with mon­ey and access to a com­put­er would be able to exchange mon­ey for goods and ser­vices with­out the bar­ri­ers of the estab­lished finan­cial sys­tems.”

The prin­ci­ples behind cryp­tocur­ren­cy writ large are the same decen­tral­ized ones behind the larg­er inter­net of putting peo­ple on an equal foot­ing, but apply­ing it to mon­ey.

That said, Bit­coin does have its detrac­tors and has expe­ri­enced some dis­con­cert­ing grow­ing pains. Because the cur­ren­cy is unreg­u­lat­ed and a rel­a­tive­ly small per­cent­age of over­all wealth is invest­ed in it, it’s pos­si­ble for major play­ers to have out­sized impacts.

“When Chi­na jumped into bit­coin, we saw the val­ue go from $100 to $1,300. When the gov­ern­ment scaled back its invest­ment it dropped to $400, and now is hov­er­ing around $700,” Jank said. “Some peo­ple made a lot of mon­ey, some peo­ple lost a lot of mon­ey, but it was the same way dur­ing the gold rush.”

Reign­ing in that volatil­i­ty is a mat­ter of spread­ing the bit­coin to a larg­er num­ber of busi­ness­es and con­sumers, he said.

“Right now, you can’t always get what you want in exchange for bit­coin ‚so it can add an extra step, but I can see it becom­ing some­thing like a check­ing account. The new peo­ple who use and accept bit­coin are also bring­ing in new ideas about low­er­ing the bar­ri­ers,” Jank said.

In the long-run, Jank sees cryp­tocur­ren­cy as a poten­tial cure for some of our finan­cial woes (think deficits and default­ing), and a equal­i­ty-dri­ven world,. If you want to hear how, you’ll need a tick­et for TEDxSalem 2014. Buy one now.