Fred Ehrsam is a millennial entrepreneur whose idea could revolutionize online payments. Ever since a friend from Duke University introduced him to the idea of bitcoins, Ehrsam has voraciously researched about them. Ehrsam is the co-founder of a company called Coinbase, a bitcoin brokerage agency that behaves like a bank for bitcoins. A bitcoin is an electronic form of currency that Ehrsam and his partner, Brian Armstrong, believe will be embraced as wholeheartedly as e-mail. The basic concept for Coinbase is a place where consumers can purchase and store bitcoins, which are available at any time to be used as a substitute for money. Coinbase will keep track of the codes that correspond to your bitcoins, making sure that you can access your money, as well as keeping them extremely secure from hackers and other people trying to steal your money. Ehrsam and Armstrong are trying to ameliorate the bitcoin’s name, since it is typically associated with underhanded black market Internet interactions. They point out that with bitcoins, credit cards could become obsolete because bitcoins do not require personal information, merely the code that corresponds to your specific bitcoin. Instead of having to type out a lot of personal information and risking credit card fraud, a consumer would be able to simply input their bitcoin code and continue on with the purchase without having to share sensitive personal information. Information breaches like the one at Target recently could become a thing of the past.
This seems like a potentially good idea, but I’ll be interested to see if it takes off. While people are concerned about credit card fraud and whatnot on the internet, I don’t know how willing they will be to trust a new payment method if they don’t understand it. They’ll have to make sure that they explain the concept well in order for it to do well in the market.