This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, April 13th, 2016. I'm Caleb Brown.

What will blockchain technology mean for business in the coming years?

Patrick Byrne, who just this week stepped down temporarily as CEO of overstock.com for medical reasons,

visited the Cato Institute for its conference on cryptocurrency held yet. for medical

reasons,

and rumors and I've seen rumors for a very long time about various large business enterprises.

Among them, Amazon and Walmart sort of people opining about when are these companies going to begin accepting

Bitcoin payments and of course they really haven't.

overstock.com did.

So what are some of the challenges posed by introducing this technology of at the time, at

least a relatively volatile currency and a new payment platform for an online retailer.

How challenging was that?

No challenge whatsoever. It's nine days and there's no risk because we we went to

Coinbase we integrated with them. They provide merchant wallets. It took us nine days.

Went live with it. We, once you've, now then you take the Bitcoin, in our case we take the Bitcoin and immediately turn back into

dollars, actually 90 percent, I think we bank 10 percent or we keep 10%.

That 90, the goal is to get liquidity.

liquidity Wall Street, they say,

liquidity begets liquidity.

In other words, the reason there was so much volatility in Bitcoin was because it has been

so illiquid.

If more people take it and more people start spending it, even if the people taking it are

...