CNBC anchor Joe Kernen says Bitcoin reminds him of the early days of Amazon.
The increasingly crypto-friendly Kernen hosted Muneeb Ali, the CEO and co-founder of the decentralized computing network Blockstack PBC, on CNBC’s Squawk Box on Sunday.
Kernen asked Ali whether he thought Bitcoin was “digital gold.” Ali responded that he “absolutely” did.
“I’m a computer scientist, and I think in the last decade the single biggest technical breakthrough that has happened in different areas – Bitcoin is probably at the top of the list.”
Kernen seemed to share similar sentiments.
“Electricity, the internet, and then the internet of money… think about Amazon in 1998, where people didn’t understand anything about it.”
Kernen’s remarks seem to be a continuation of comments he made on Squawk Box in July, when he said efforts to put the crypto genie back in the bottle were like trying to stop the industrial revolution.
“Take the friction of transferring money to whomever – you can take it to zero. Like Amazon took retail to zero. You can take [money friction] to zero.
Do you know how powerful that would be? It’s going to put a lot of people out of business. This is the kind of creative destruction – it’s like trying to stop the industrial age. You can’t.”
During Squawk Box’s Sunday interview, Ali also spoke about Blockstack’s competitor, Ethereum.
“I think Ethereum is an interesting experiment, and they’re always very experimental, like in the sense that they would try out risky things, and it’s good to have a project like that, that is covering that space, and obviously any comments that I make about Ethereum, you should keep in mind that we directly provide an alternative to the kind of things that they’re trying to do.”
