Bitcoin has conflicted me. I see brilliance and world-changing potential. But its pricing instability leads me to believe it will never stabilise until it has some sort of secondary value to prevent confidence crisis and create predictability on the value as a currency. But maybe that’s the wrong question to be pondering?
In January 2014 (when I actually wrote this post but didn’t publish it) I realised that two of the innovations created by BitCoin is the blockchain and the proof of work, are useful beyond currency. For the uninitiated, every single transaction that used BitCoin is documented in a public ledger that everyone in the world can see. The proof of chain is a process that motivates ‘miners’ to validate the transaction in the blockchain. Together, you have a decentralised trust system that no central entity every needs to mediate in.
But the realisation I had was that Bitcoin is not a currency: it’s an asset. And that asset, is that it is the world’s first global decentralised system that can validate transactions.
Now imagine I sent a bitcoin transaction between two accounts that I owned, say that were valued as 25, 122,013 satoshi’s (about 1/4 the value of a Bitcoin) — numbers that can also be interpreted as Christmas day 2013.
Now go back to my assertion: Bitcoin is the world’s first global decentralised system that can validate transactions. And how many transactions occur, including non-financial records of receipt such as dates or domain name looks ups which are actually IP addresses.
Bitcoin might not be the world currency because it’s protocol isn’t fast enough for real time money spending (it takes 10 minutes to validate a transaction) and its unstable as a store of value. But when you think about it a global receipt book, I hope you now get how this is game changing.
If the entire computing revolution is based on binary code — 1’s and 0’s — so long as something can be boiled down into a number and there is value in validating it, then Bitcoin will have place in the world.
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