To some of the long-term investors in the blockchain market, the recent steep rise and precipitous fall of cryptocurrency mirrors earlier boom-and-bust cycles that came about during the infancy of the internet.

“I’ve been to this rodeo before; I was trading utility tokens 20 years ago, when they were called something else,” said Bradley Rotter (pictured), a pioneer blockchain investor and co-founder of the Entanglement Research Institute Inc.

Today’s utility tokens remind Rotter of the excitement that surrounded the “indefeasible right of use” in the telecom industry — when companies were investing heavily in bandwidth and laying cable across the ocean floor. The companies actually laid too much cable; much of the fiber stayed dark and many companies went bankrupt. In the same sense, he thinks there are too many tokens right now, so cryptocurrency is going through a much-needed correction phase.

Rotter spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), cohosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Global Cloud and Blockchain Summit last week in Toronto. They discussed the currency of the internet and how cryptocurrency can help fund both infrastructure and quantum computing.

The internet needs its own currency

Although bitcoin was a brilliant construct, Rotter believes the eventual currency of the internet may be something different. He’s also disappointed in bitcoin’s adoption because it’s still difficult to use, so very few people use it in their daily lives.

“At a macro scale, I think it’s apparent that the internet deserves its own currency — of course it does,” he said. “And there will be an internet currency. The trick is, which currency shall that be?”

Rotter’s most exciting recent project is the Entanglement Institute, a public-private partnership with the U.S. government to build the first megaquantum computing center in Newport, Rhode Island. It will be funded in part by security infrastructure tokens, where private citizens, in addition to the U.S. government, can invest in public infrastructure.

Since quantum computing promises to be as much as 100 million times faster than today’s compute, it’s critical for the future security of the U.S. to gain supremacy in this area, according to Rotter. Entanglement Institute is a current-day version of the Manhattan Project, he explained.

“I believe it’s a matter of national security that we form a national initiative to gain quantum supremacy, or [as] I call it, data supremacy,” Rotter said.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Global Cloud and Blockchain Summit:

 Photo: SiliconANGLE