Interview Bitcoin Beloved by Billionaire Bubba

Reid Hoffman has an expert eye for promising tech startups. The LinkedIn chairman and co-founder's early stakes in Facebook, Airbnb and Dropbox prove he's able to see the next big thing before most of us even know what it is -- and its paid off for him time and again.

These days, the so-called startup whisperer is placing his bets on Bitcoin. As a full-time partner at venture capital firm Greylock Partners, he claims his primary focus is to invest in world-class entrepreneurs with new categories of ideas with the possibility of massive scale. One of those entrepreneurs is Wences Casares, co-founder of Xapo, an ambitious, Palo Alto, Calif.-based Bitcoin wallet and storage startup. With Hoffman leading the charge, Greylock invested $20 million in Xapo last year.

Bitcoin has the potential to be a massively disruptive technology, Hoffman wrote in a post announcing the investment last July. It is the leading digital currency and its growing fast.

Related:LinkedIn's Reid Hoffman: Success Tips From Silicon Valley

Then, in November -- a month before Bloomberg declared Bitcoin the worst-performing currency of 2014 -- he announced a hefty personal stake in Bitcoin that he brokered, a $21 million investment into Blockstream. The Montreal-based startup aims to improve upon Bitcoins blockchain backbone, the shared public ledger upon which the virtual currencys entire network relies.

We caught up with the father of online professional networking recently to find out why hes betting big on Bitcoin and why he thinks the controversial cryptocurrency is here to stay. What follows are portions of that interview, edited for clarity and brevity.

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When did Bitcoin first pique your curiosity and when did you become a believer? I first got into it after speaking with Wences Casares, who I refer to as Patient Zero for Bitcoin in Silicon Valley. Patient Zero is the first infection of a viral contagion.

Id been paying attention to Bitcoin because a couple of other people that Wences had talked with, like Katana Capital founder Charlie Songhurst, had also talked to me about it and said that it was very important. No one had made the argument in a way that stuck yet, but it made me curious. I started to really think about it, so I sought out Wences in the summer of 2013. We had a fairly thorough conversation. He articulated very strong positive theories about Bitcoin and I began to feel empowered.

Related: IBM Looking at Adopting Bitcoin Technology for Major Currencies

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Interview Bitcoin Beloved by Billionaire Bubba