Lightspeed VC Jeremy Liew loves bitcoins: Here's why

Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed Venture Partners sees several ways that startups will take advantage of the growing use of bitcoins as currency.

The partner at the Menlo Park firm recently backed OpenCoin, the developer of the Ripple payment protocol and says Lightspeed has put money in another undisclosed bitcoin play.

Early adopters of using the virtual electronic currency were attracted because it is an anonymous and free way to buy and sell goods and services. But it has also been the target of several runs, temporarily crashing its value.

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But in a conversation with me, Liew explained why he thinks startups that are being built around the use of bitcoin are potentially big growth investments.

He also talked about a pair of social networking startups that are carving markets in areas that were once thought to be the exclusive domain of Facebook.
Here are excerpts of our conversation:

What interests you about bitcoins?

Bitcoins offers two advantages, or two distinctions to most other forms of digital payment. The first is that it’s anonymous. And the second is that it has zero transaction cost.

Up until this point, I think most of the people or many of the people who are excited about using bitcoins to pay for transactions were attracted to the first of those advantages, anonymity. And if you want to keep yourself anonymous in a transaction, half the time it was because there’s something a little bit shady involved in the transaction. You saw a lot of that in the first generation of people using bitcoins.

What is just starting to happen is there’s a preponderance of people who are interested in the second distinction, which is zero transaction cost. That has an appeal to a much broader set of people. It has the opportunity to really disrupt a number of fairly important use cases, whether it would be micro transactions, international trade or international money transfer. I’m interested in bitcoins because I’m starting to see a much broader and more legitimate set of use cases starting to emerge relative to what was driving it in the beginning. Read more here: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2013/04/29/lightspeed-vc-jeremy-liew-loves.html