Trees CEO: Cannabis will be a bigger industry than big tobacco... And it needs bitcoin

Marshall Hayner, CEO of Trees, a San Francisco-based dispensary, spoke at CoinCongress 2015 about his company, medical marijuana and its relation to bitcoin, as reported by cryptocoinsnews.com.

"Gavin Andresen said a couple of years ago that the legal marijuana industry is going to be possibly the biggest industries for Bitcoin," Hayner began.

"The biggest problem for the cannabis industry is it has no banking partners," he explained and added that he believes cannabis will be a bigger industry than big tobacco.

That's where Bitcoin comes into the picture. He believes that the cannabis industry, in many ways, needs Bitcoin...it just doesn't know it.

"Bitcoin is just a technology, but in its early phase, it is still too nascent to ask for the cannabis industry to adopt," the Trees CEO said and added, "It is an industry that came from the black market, went to the gray market, and is now becoming a white market. To ask these people in this industry to change and use a technology that is so new and so scary is just too much."

Hayner sees huge opportunities for people to build technology platforms that allow people to bank with Bitcoin. He does not believe Bitcoin needs to be on the front-end of a platform. Instead, he thinks Bitcoin should be in the backend so that people might not even know they are using something like Bitcoin.

"I see it as the clearing house of the internet," the cannabis-tech entrepreneur said. Bitcoin can solve more than cash problems, he went on.

"There is so much that can be done with the block chain in terms of categorizing cannabis and proving that it came from the original factory where it was made and sign all this with a private key and embed it in the block chain using tokenization," Hayner told the crowd.

"They have no way to prove the authenticity of their cannabis besides centralized websites," he said. "This is where Bitcoin can shine."