Naval Ravikant

China may censor YouTube. China may censor Twitter. They won't be able to censor Bitcoin. There's no central authority. There's no one you can go to and say, 'We're going to turn Bitcoin off.'

I think it just helps to be very aware that fundamentally, there are no adults. Everyone is making it up as they go along. You have to find your own path, picking, choosing, taking and discarding as you see fit.

Be present. Be meditative. Form real friendships. Stay away from business networking events or friendships where there is always an underlying business angle.

ICOs are obviously a new and interesting form of funding for blockchain-based protocols, but it's not clear that all of them comply with U.S. securities laws or that all of them are companies that have good native use cases for new coins.

While the traditional banks and credit card companies lock down access to their payments infrastructure to a handful of trusted parties, Bitcoin is open to all.

It's almost always possible to be honest and positive.

Just as the web democratized publishing and development, Bitcoin can democratize building new financial services. Contracts can be entered into, verified, and enforced completely electronically, using any third-party that you care to trust, or by the code itself.

Within my social circle, there is a large group of people who will take bitcoin as legal tender; like, you can go to them and settle debts in Bitcoin, and they will happily take it.

The best founders are extremely thoughtful and have an eye for quality. I don't know if there's any generic advice here that would be helpful. Startup knowledge is a moving target.

I think of Twitter as the place where I go to have a great conversation when I can't have one locally, which seems to be all the time, and the more time that I spend on Twitter, the more I sort of curate this incredible group of very intelligent people that I just get to know purely through the quality of their thoughts.

We're going to try and prove to the market that you can do a legal coin offering. If the SEC doesn't crack down, this party will be amazing - the biggest party in town for a long time. If they do crack down, a lot of people are going to feel a lot of pain.

Cryptocurrencies will create a fifth protocol layer powering the next generation of the Internet.