Bitcoin isn't the thing. It's the thing that gets you to the thing.

in cryptocurrency •  7 years ago 

The incessant infighting in the bitcoin community about the vision for the project culminated in a literal parting of ways with the Bitcoin cash hard fork. The simplified version of this schism is that bitcoin cash people want bitcoin to be the actual intended use of bitcoin, digital cash. they wanted to fix the problem of high transaction fees and long wait times. They saw these things as integral to bitcoin because it needs to be usable as a medium of exchange. The bitcoin core community talks about Lightning network and other ways to make it easier to carry out transactions, but they have basically accepted that bitcoin core is a store of value and not a medium of exchange. 

These are two undeniably important factors in defining what money is, but there's a third part that is often deemed insignificant but is going to become incredibly important for mass adoption, and that is being a unit of measure.

Bitpay is a great company that has popularized bitcoin and they have been truly important in the adoption of cryptocurrencies. The problem with Bitpay however is the idea that people aren't buying things in terms of bitcoin. When you go to a restaurant and prices are listed in USD and you pay in bitcoin, there's always calculations being done behind the scenes and the merchant is getting paid in USD. Because no prices are listed in bitcoin, there's nothing attached to it. When you think about $5 you don't think about keeping it because it'll go up in value and you can get more stuff with it. It actually is pretty much guaranteed to go down in value, but that's beside the point. The point is that money is always supposed to be a secondary layer of resource allocation. 

In the show Halt and Catch Fire Joe Macmillan says "computers aren't the thing, they're the thing that gets you to the thing." The same is true about money. The only reason money is good is because of what it gets us. Currently, cryptocurrencies are on a tertiary layer, where they're removed from material goods too far to be useful. They have to be converted into fiat currencies and then you can get what you really want. Crypto has proved that it is a store of value that hedges against inflation as BTC does, and it's proven to be useful as a medium of exchange because it can be liquid like BCH. The third and final part is being listed in prices. Crypto must move from a tertiary to a secondary level. 

Although money is removed from material resources because it has no value other than as money, it is what connects all of the material world. It is what allows us to compare things quickly and easily. If the material world is outerspace and barter is typical three dimensional travel as we know it, money is a wormhole. It gets us where we want to be. The problem is right now, those wormholes are owned and controlled by an institution that is very manifestly our enemy. Crypto is about taking it back. It's about controlling the secondary layer. money, so that we can control the primary layer: the material world. The point of this experiment is to have the freedom to control what matters to us. 

I understand that from a practical standpoint you have to work in fiat currencies for the time being, but if you're not thinking about prices in terms of cryptocurrencies, you're not thinking far enough into the future.

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Hmm..u r right🤙

Informative bro. But how do you deal with the constant price fluctuations in bitcoin cos something you could get let's say for 1btc today tomorrow would cost less cos bitcoin is ever growing.

Anyone who quotes Halt And Catch Fire is my friend!