Rick Merritt, EETimes
2/4/2014 00:01 AM EST
SAN JOSE, Calif. — Bitcoin will spawn an emerging market for specialized parallel processors, according to a veteran high-tech investor, but one young startup engineer is skeptical.
"There's a big opportunity in silicon with a new wave of chip design ideas, which is not something we would have predicted a year ago," said Marc Andreessen co-founder and principal of Andreessen Horowitz.
Bitcoin is an online alternative to currency and banking that requires specialized silicon. This kind of "crypto currency is the first thing like the Internet since the Internet," said Andreessen in an on-stage talk at the Open Compute Summit last week.