According
to former Facebook executive and venture capitalist Chamath
Palihapitiya, adding identity to the pseudo-anonymous Bitcoin currency
will help legitimize it. In it’s current state, Bitcoin
transactions are anonymous to an extent. Bitcoin addresses and
transactions don’t carry any identity, and could be kept anonymous by
the owner if they wanted. But in the public Bitcoin ledger, the block
chain, all transactions can be viewed and analysed by anyone.However, Palihapitiya thinks building a layer on top of the Bitcoin protocol using Facebook’s Open Graph will be able to validate bitcoins anonymous transactions. By tying user identities to Bitcoin transactions, Palihapitiya says “that’s the type of simplification that allows Bitcoin to get to the mass market.”
Introducing identity would add “tremendous value” and is something that Facebook would be able to do, he said. “I think the only company that could legitimately do it is Facebook,” said Palihapitiya. He also said he thinks Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg thinks “Bitcoin is cool.”
