This Top CEO Threatened To Fire Employees Who Traded Bitcoin. Here's Why That's Terrible Leadership

There are many instances of CEO's coming out against new technologies. The CEO of blockbuster famously said that Netflix is not their competitor. RIM CEO said that people only wanted to use a physical keyboard. The former CEO of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer said that the enterprise would never use the iPhone. We all know how those statements turned out. Whether he's right or wrong won't be apparent for at least another 5-10 years--and my opinion is biased, since I own both Bitcoin and Ethereum. So I reached out to three blockchain experts to get their inputs on Dimon's quote. Broadly, Thieriot is right: Incumbents have been historically bad at understanding what can destroy them. Dimon was passionate when he said Bitcoin is a fraud, and he took it a step further threatening to fire employees over trading Bitcoin. I can understand the trading aspect given the volatility, but making a bold statement like this can't sit well with JP Morgan employees looking to create better futures for their customers using technology. A leader coming out publicly with this kind of statement might be a great thing for his shareholders, but it puts emerging employees in a tough position. Dimon just told his employees, in very clear terms, to not think about the future of the company. He even took it further by threatening to fire them. If I were an emerging leader in that company, I'd think twice about sharing my ideas and thoughts going forward. Is it okay for you to guide your employees to not trade Bitcoin, Is it okay to threaten to fire them over it in a public manner, No, and it will cause the best employees to think twice about working for you.

All four sides of the network effect are playing a valuable part in expanding the value of the overall system, but the fourth is particularly important. All over Silicon Valley and around the world, many thousands of programmers are using Bitcoin as a building block for a kaleidoscope of new product and service ideas that were not possible before. And at our venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, we are seeing a rapidly increasing number of outstanding entrepreneurs - not a few with highly respected track records in the financial industry - building companies on top of Bitcoin. For this reason alone, new challengers to Bitcoin face a hard uphill battle. If something is to displace Bitcoin now, it will have to have sizable improvements and it will have to happen quickly. Otherwise, this network effect will carry Bitcoin to dominance. One immediately obvious and enormous area for Bitcoin-based innovation is international remittance. 400 billion in total annually, according to the World Bank.

Every day, banks and payment companies extract mind-boggling fees, up to 10 percent and sometimes even higher, to send this money. Switching to Bitcoin, which charges no or very low fees, for these remittance payments will therefore raise the quality of life of migrant workers and their families significantly. In fact, it is hard to think of any one thing that would have a faster and more positive effect on so many people in the world’s poorest countries. Moreover, Bitcoin generally can be a powerful force to bring a much larger number of people around the world into the modern economic system. Only about 20 countries around the world have what we would consider to be fully modern banking and payment systems; the other roughly 175 have a long way to go. As a result, many people in many countries are excluded from products and services that we in the West take for granted. Even Netflix, a completely virtual service, is only available in about 40 countries.

Bitcoin, as a global payment system anyone can use from anywhere at any time, can be a powerful catalyst to extend the benefits of the modern economic system to virtually everyone on the planet. And even here in the United States, a long-recognized problem is the extremely high fees that the “unbanked” — people without conventional bank accounts - pay for even basic financial services. Bitcoin can be used to go straight at that problem, by making it easy to offer extremely low-fee services to people outside of the traditional financial system. A third fascinating use case for Bitcoin is micropayments, or ultrasmall payments. 1 and below, down to pennies or fractions of a penny) through the existing credit/debit and banking systems. The fee structure of those systems makes that nonviable. All of a sudden, with Bitcoin, that’s trivially easy. Bitcoins have the nifty property of infinite divisibility: currently down to eight decimal places after the dot, but more in the future.