The Startup Meant to Reinvent What Bitcoin Can Do

By  Tom Simonite 

A company given $21 million by leading Silicon Valley investors aims to extend Bitcoin’s functionality so it can power much more than just payments.

LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman announced an unusual new investment late last month. He and other Silicon Valley luminaries, including Sun Microsystems founder Vinod Khosla, sunk $21 million into a company that may never have to make a profit to be successful.

That company is called Blockstream. Hoffman and others backed it in an effort to give a technological shot in the arm to Bitcoin, a digital currency built upon software that uses cryptographic transactions to prevent counterfeiting without the need for any central authority (see “What Bitcoin Is and Why it Matters”).

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