Secretive Bitcoin Startup Raises $116 Million in Effort to Launch Mainstream Adoption of Bitcoin

But it does not appear to be considering Bitcoin as a money.

WSJ reports:

For the past year and a half, a Silicon Valley startup has quietly convinced some of the biggest names in venture capital to back its effort to turn the technology behind bitcoin into a mass-marketed phenomenon.

Now, that company, which bears the name 21 Inc., is emerging from stealth to announce it has raised $116 million in venture funding, the most ever by a startup in the digital-currency sector, based on data from bitcoin news service Coindesk.

What it’s not yet publicizing is the precise nature of its operations, Chief Executive and co-founder Matthew Pauker will only say there will be “several interesting developments over the next weeks and months” about software and hardware products designed “to drive mainstream adoption of bitcoin.”...

According to Silicon Valley investors such as those taking stakes in 21, say that failure to gain mass adoption is partly because the public’s attention has been misguidedly focused on bitcoin’s limited potential as a digital alternative to traditional currencies. In reality, they say, its underlying technology has far wider applications than that. Unlike the currency transactions that are generally associated with bitcoin, these new uses could range from lawyer-free smart contracts to tamper-proof online voting systems.

21’s lead investors include U.S. venture-capital heavyweights Andreessen Horowitz and RRE Ventures, along with Chinese private-equity firm Yuan Capital, with a strategic stake going to chipmaker Qualcomm Inc. through its venture-capital unit.

Without knowing specifics, this appears to me to have the potential to be even more dangerous, from a libertarian perspective, than Bitcoin as a money. Bitcoin as a money tracks where you spend all your money (and with extreme effort can be done anonymously), but the logging of other types of transactions would be all about the reverse of anonymity, where anyone could look up on the internet and discover any recorded transactions of a given individual. This is not a libertarian dream, it is a nightmare. It could result in the ultimate in government tracking of an individual's life.

Bitcoin is moving in the direction of becoming a tool for totalitarians.

-RW