Can Bitcoin Survive a Hard Fork? Xapo's Wences Casares on Block Size and Bitcoin's Future

"I think bitcoin is more robust because we cannot depend on Satoshi [Nakamoto, creator of bitcoin] to say, 'Hey, Satoshi, what do we do with the block size?'" says Wences Casares, founder of the bitcoin wallet Xapo. "I think that would be a weaker bitcoin."

Casares is an entrepreneur who brought the first internet service provider to his home country of Argentina and then launched the mega successful online brokerage firm Patagon. So people listen when he says that bitcoin "may change the world more than the Internet did."

Reason TV's Zach Weissmueller sat down with Casares in Xapo's San Francisco headquarters and discussed the state of bitcoin, why he believes that bitcoin's core technology needs modification to increase block size, and why such a modification doesn't threaten the future of the crypotcurrency as some critics fear. They also discussed how bitcoin can help people in developing countries to protect themselves against hyperinflation, why he believes that everyone should own a little (but not too much) bitcoin, and why Xapo stores its bitcoin private keys in vaults underneath the Swiss Alps.