Former Paypal president: only Bitcoin is revolutionary

Recently the former president of Paypal, David Marcus, gave an interview in which he bluntly argued that only Bitcoin, and nothing else, is capable of supporting a truly open protocol for Internet payments. 

Marcus actually became most famous for something else, namely co-founding Facebook’s Libra project, which would later change its name to Diem. 

But what counts most on his resume is his long experience in the field of digital payments. 

PayPal: David Marcus is pro-Bitcoin

Although he was born in 1973, he already got involved in online payments in the early 2000s when he founded a company to monetize mobile media.

And in 2008, which was the year Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin whitepaper, he founded Zong, which allowed users to pay for items online directly from their cell phones. 

Later Zong was acquired by PayPal and eBay, when these two companies were still merged together, and then in 2011 Marcus became vice president and general manager of Paypal’s mobile division.

The following year he was appointed president of PayPal itself, but in 2014 he was hired at Facebook as vice president of messaging products. The following year Facebook Messenger introduced a P2P payment platform thanks to his push. 

His entry into the crypto world came in 2017, when he was appointed to the board of Coinbase, thanks precisely to his experience in digital payments at both PayPal and Facebook. 

The following year, however, he had to leave his role at Coinbase, because after being chosen to lead Facebook’s experimental blockchain group he had come into a conflict of interest. 

The general public got to know him in June 2019, when his division of Facebook announced the launch of the Libra project, which was the company’s cryptocurrency that later never saw the light of day. 

The following year Libra was renamed Diem, with the goal of creating a stablecoin, but even this Facebook project failed. At that point Marcus was put in charge of the Facebook Financial division, which handles payments on Facebook and WhatsApp. 

However, in 2021 Marcus left Facebook, which has since become Meta, to co-found Lightspark in 2022, which is a company focused on developing technology solutions on Lightning Network. 

Marcus and Bitcoin

David Marcus has been a Bitcoin aficionado and supporter for many years, long before he and Facebook launched the Libra/Diem project. 

In fact, he has been even before he joined Coinbase’s board of directors in 2017. 

It is worth noting that 2017 was the year of the second major post-halving speculative bubble in the crypto markets, four years before the last one occurred in 2021. 

During his interview in recent days, Marcus recounts that he came across Bitcoin’s whitepaper as early as a few years after its publication, but did not want to delve into it at the time. 

He first approached blockchain in 2012, when he was working at PayPal and had to deal with a minor business crisis in Argentina due to the country’s government’s decision to force the company to block all money sent abroad.

It was at that point that he sensed the potential of a censorship-free P2P payment network like Bitcoin. 

What’s more, he states that the day PayPal received an order from the Argentine government to block all money transfers abroad, and was forced to enforce it, the price of Bitcoin rose significantly, causing it to soar. It is worth mentioning that in 2012 there was the first halving, and the following year there was the first major post-halving speculative bubble. 

In fact, in May 2013 he attended the Bitcoin 2013 conference in San Jose, California, and was fascinated by the breakthrough Bitcoin is bringing to the world of digital payments. 

Marcus and Lightning Network

In 2018 David Marcus met with the CEO of the development company on Lightning Network (LN) Lightning Labs, Elizabeth Stark, because he was trying to figure out if LN was indeed the right way to go, and if there was a way to actually use Bitcoin.

He was working for Facebook at the time, and was preparing to launch Libra. 

But in 2018 LN was still not solid enough for Facebook, so the idea was shelved. 

When he left Facebook in 2021, he became interested in LN again, but he still felt it was an incomplete protocol in terms of the needs useful to make it a mass tool. 

For this reason, in 2022 he began work on developing solutions on LN suitable for use by the masses as well. 

Bitcoin and nothing else for the former PayPal president

But the key point of this interview is when he compares Bitcoin with other blockchain-based solutions. 

In fact he says that at Meta it was not possible to create a truly decentralized solution, and then he began to realize that it would be a futile exercise to try to develop a decentralized online payment system on any blockchain other than Bitcoin.

He said: 

“We’ve built the unshakeable conviction at this point that the only blockchain and the only underlying assets that can support a truly open protocol for payments on the internet is Bitcoin and nothing else.”

Note that the Lightspark team he leads is not alone in thinking this way. 

Indeed, while there are many alternative technological solutions to Bitcoin, there are none with the same high degree of decentralization. 

Importantly, there is perhaps no such thing as absolute total decentralization, only varying degrees of decentralization. 

Among cryptocurrencies the one with the highest degree of decentralization is definitely Bitcoin, with Ethereum following closely but at some distance, while the vast majority of other blockchain-based projects have a low, very low, or in some cases even nonexistent degree of real decentralization. 

The real revolution introduced by Satoshi Nakamoto in late 2008 and early 2009 is precisely decentralization. Without this precise feature, cryptocurrencies lose their innovative power, becoming just yet another inefficient technology for moving value. 

And given that Bitcoin is the most decentralized cryptocurrency around, it is more than obvious that many consider it the only one that can truly make a revolution, although Ethereum continues to follow close behind.