{"id":25653,"date":"2015-12-01T22:31:08","date_gmt":"2015-12-01T22:31:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ci027cfe7b40102697"},"modified":"2015-12-01T22:31:08","modified_gmt":"2015-12-01T22:31:08","slug":"bitgo-s-mike-belshe-on-doing-what-matters-1449009068","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/culture\/bitgo-s-mike-belshe-on-doing-what-matters-1449009068","title":{"rendered":"BitGo\u2019s Mike Belshe on Doing What Matters"},"content":{"rendered":"
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BitGo<\/a><\/p>\n

co-founder and CEO Mike Belshe remembers when the fascination with computer engineering that began for him in childhood made its most emphatic statement and claim on his life. <\/p>\n

He had just left old warhorse Hewlett-Packard, his first job out of college, to join Internet browser pioneer Netscape as it was poised to launch its initial public stock offering in 1995. (His departure was rather too sudden to suit the sensibilities of his \u201cHP Way\u201d bosses, but that\u2019s another story.)<\/p>\n

Commencing to work almost non-stop through long days and nights \u201cnot because of deadlines, but because I loved it so much,\u201d Belshe was driving across town with fellow computer geek and visionary Rob McCool one day when they were simultaneously awe-struck by the same sight: a large billboard with \u201chttp:\u201d sprawled across its face, followed by a web address.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhoa!\u201d McCool exclaimed. \u201cI never thought I would see that.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cThe billboard spoke to him,\u201d Belshe remembers. \u201cThat\u2019s when I realized that what we were doing really matters.\u201d <\/p>\n

This theme of engagement with things of import is a recurrent theme in Belshe\u2019s life. It partly explains the intriguing mix of five-star companies and start-ups dotting his resume. After HP and Netscape, Microsoft was another major stop; from there he migrated to Google just in time to help lead the development of Chrome. He stayed there for a half-decade. <\/p>\n

Start-ups included Good Technology, Remarq and his own Lookout Software with partner Eric Hahn. All of them were successes in their own right, though it was neither money nor conventional pride that drove Belshe\u2019s journeys along the tech frontiers of his day. It has always been more about using his supple intelligence and imagination to help bring something interesting and important into the world, most always with highly technical solutions that ultimately filter down into the usefulness and parlance of everyday users who have no particular technical skill. <\/p>\n

And now there is Bitcoin security company BitGo, steadily picking up market share as the first \u201cmulti-signature\u201d wallet in the Bitcoin world. The platform makes use of Belshe\u2019s problem-solving and programming ingenuity to bring greater ease and utility to the thorny problem of securing bitcoins. <\/p>\n

It is a kind of gift, this ability to bridge the worlds of software engineering via complex, exacting code and an end product that the proverbial Iowa Grandma can manage with ease from the comfort of her kitchen table. <\/p>\n

As Belshe himself freely admitted in a recent plain-spoken blog post at belshe.com<\/a>, Bitcoin isn\u2019t anywhere near reaching Grandma yet. <\/p>\n

\u201cBitcoin in Denial\u201d ran the headline on his post, which conveyed a \u201cSlow down, this is gonna take a while\u201d message to those who envision Bitcoin triumphing over fiat currencies and the credit card industry and reaching Grandma by next week or next year. But if anyone will eventually be able to carve the road to her, it will be Belshe. <\/p>\n

Two decades into a tech career that he remembers being ignited by a computer magazine that his electrical engineer father brought home, he now finds himself at a mid-career sweet spot. With deep experience behind him, industry contacts and resources galore, and still copious energy, he is committed to making Bitcoin the most secure digital asset tool ever devised without its users, in his words, \u201chaving to learn how to operate a digital asset vault.\u201d <\/p>\n

Belshe co-founded BitGo in 2013, just a year after discovering Bitcoin and loading up on a bunch of coins for himself and various friends on a dedicated offline laptop he kept under his couch. \u201cWith Bitcoin\u2019s price going up, I realized I had a staggering amount of money just sitting there on a laptop. I was following best practices, but I felt scared enough to look for a better way to store all these coins.\u201d <\/p>\n

A quick survey found him surprised that there really weren\u2019t any better security mousetraps at the time, so he set about to invent one. Anyone who knows Belshe could have predicted it wouldn\u2019t take him long. <\/p>\n

BitGo launched the world\u2019s first multi-signature wallet last August, created by Belshe himself using a \u201cP2SH\u201d protocol that was developed by Gavin Andresen<\/a>, chief scientist of the Bitcoin Foundation and Bitcoin\u2019s lead core developer at the time. <\/p>\n

While his service won\u2019t quite reach Grandma yet, it has given Bitcoin holders an unparalleled means of securely holding their funds without fear of either being hacked or suffering some human error of forgetfulness or misplacement. It turns out, by the way, that error is a far more common cause of lost bitcoins than is the more feared specter of malevolent hackers. <\/p>\n

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We wanted a system that doesn\u2019t depend on anyone else and wasn\u2019t vulnerable to theft, a lost hard disk or paper wallet, or a forgotten-and- now-gone password,\u201d Belshe says. \u201cThe challenge is always this: How do you improve security in a way users understand?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Belshe & Co. appear to be meeting that challenge with growth figures ($1 billion transacted in the third quarter) and a corporate profile for which less substantive startups would no doubt hand over a good portion of their Bitcoin vaults. P2SH or pay to script hash addresses have grown more than 84 percent over the past 90 days, and BitGo controls the majority share of market for P2SH Bitcoin addresses. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s all big-time fun, which is one crucial metric Belshe applies to virtually all his professional endeavors. But even more important, if he were advising young people just launching their careers, is this: \u201cDo something that matters.\u201d <\/p>\n

One gets the sense that having fun and doing things that matter have become almost one and the same thing for Belshe. That\u2019s just one more sweet spot in a career from which the Bitcoin world is now benefiting in ways that matter greatly to it. <\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n

This post originally appeared in yBitcoin.<\/em><\/p>\n

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BitGo co-founder and CEO Mike Belshe remembers when the fascination with computer engineering that began for him in childhood made its most emphatic statement and claim on his life. He had just left old warhorse Hewlett-Packard, his first job out of college, to join Internet browser pioneer Netscape as it was poised to launch its […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2520,"featured_media":25654,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[410,882,3576,3312,176],"class_list":{"0":"post-25653","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture","8":"tag-addresses","9":"tag-bitgo","10":"tag-coins","11":"tag-mike-belshe","12":"tag-startups"},"author_data":{"id":2520,"name":"Bitcoin Magazine","nicename":"bitcoin-magazine","avatar_url":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/bitcoin-magazine-logo.jpeg"},"featured_image_url":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/bitgos-mike-belshe-on-doing-what-matters.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25653","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2520"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25653"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25653\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25654"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}