Overstock CEO Electrifies at Investment Bank Oppenheimer’s Blockchain Event

“Warning! This is all risky, it may all fail.”That was how Patrick Byrne, CEO of Overstock, concluded his keynote about investing in blockchain at a Wednesday event in New York hosted by investment bank and brokerage Oppenheimer & Co. Unusually formal in a suit and tie, Byrne electrified what had until that point been a fairly low-key crowd with his well-honed stump speech for blockchain’s transformative potential. Oppenheimer clients filled more nearly 150 seats and were enthusiastically taking pictures of Byrne’s slides illustrating his vision of the most promising applications of blockchain.He opened his presentation by providing a brief overview of traditional securities trading and its pitfalls – highlighting, as he has been wont to do for years, the fact that due to the arcane structure of today’s market, the ownership of stocks is indirect and somehow dubious. In one of many lines to draw laughs from the crowd, he said:“All the corporate shares in America are owned by the company called Cede & Co, and what you actually have is a contractual claim against a corporation, that has a contractual claim against another corporation, that has a contractual claim against DTCC, that has a contractual claim against Cede & Co. What can go wrong?”