Ideas Never Die

So this is the news I came across recently. Typical rant about cryptos being fake money and all that jazz. Seriously, this is what the man said:-

"It's just not a real thing, eventually it will be closed" (source)

He was saying that Bitcoin will closed down by the government due to its rebellious nature. Maybe he's just clueless about the technology, since there's no way to stop this all that easily due to the decentralised nature of cryptocurrency networks. There's no single point of failure, no plug to pull to shut down Bitcoin, Ethereum, Steem, and others. This is open, permissionless innovation.

What if Bitcoin has been the "stable" currency all along since its inception? It doesn't even need to perform exceptionally well, if its competitors, such as national currencies and other traditional assets are slowly becoming "crapcoins". It's all relative. Where else can anyone depend on outside of the system if not on platforms like Bitcoin? It's volatile for sure, but it's one of the only places where your assets are not subject to what some may call predatory inflation and taxation. Who's going to regulate the regulator?

Now onto the tulips.. I'm not sure why I even want to debate this, but let's just say that tulips are perishable and not even remotely close to a form of currency as do cryptocurrencies. In addition, Bitcoin like any other cryptocurrencies are provably scarce and they're engineered to function like money. Bitcoin is the first coming together of idea, money, politics, and technology all wrapped into an automated trust protocol. So the comparison he made is highly anecdotal and not very useful. Bitcoin is no tulip, and not even tech stocks of the 90s. Then to add to his ignorance.. he starts calling Bitcoin a fraud.

Here's the thing: Bitcoin's price can go to zero and it's still not a fraud. Participation is voluntary. The project is open-sourced and its supply regulated by the Bitcoin protocol. Yes, cryptocurrencies are in fact, self-regulated entities. The code ensures predictability and transparency. This should actually be equally viewed as a form of stability. The price of cryptocurrencies might not always reflect that, but it's a fundamental shift away from arbitrary regulations. When centralised systems can be regulated by the whims of governments at any point in time for their own definition of stability, this could actually create mass instability for the rest of us. Most of the times, unknowingly.

Traditional regulation is all about maintaining expected prices just to keep things artificially stable, sometimes longer than it should. Volatility in cryptocurrency is a feature, in my opinion. Unregulated markets better reflect the pains and problems of currencies in real-time, being liquid. So it better be really valuable to deserve a high valuation, and not just because some form of regulation is artificially setting some so-called price stabilisation mechanism on it. It's not definitive and grey, but this discussion can be explored more thoroughly by studying the philosophical differences between Keynesian and Austrian economics - check out this one minute video.

Bitcoin is now still valuable as it is an idea of power decentralisation materialised through clever use of technology. The value is in its perceived breaking away from authoritative monopoly over private property, and it's currently reflected in the market. But who knows what might happen since something better always comes along. Maybe Jamie's government could even end up closing down Bitcoin, whatever that means. Regardless, the powerful ideas that Bitcoin birthed are here to stay. Maybe one day I'll see a headline in 2020 that says:-

"WTF is Steemit and why is it dominating 80% of our top search results?"