There are a lot of talking and articles about what the price of bitcoin is these days. These drive me nuts. They are missing the point completely. Here’s why…
First, i like bitcoin because it’s a technology. If you ask anyone who knows about technology, they love bitcoin (see here). It is because bitcoin is first and foremost a protocol. It has the potential to be the transaction and financial protocol for the entire internet. This doesn’t exist now. There hasn’t been a layer of internet infrastructure that was global, distributed, and not owned by any one person or company for payments. This is a technology-based architecture that looks like TCP/IP or HTTP. It can be fundamental to the internet. This is why investors and entrepreneurs are gaga about it. It can be used (and will be used) to create applications on top of and we’ll see payments and money flow on the internet in the same way we see content, images and everything else flows on the internet. It will not be controlled by any one company like PayPal or Visa and money will be unlocked.
What’s also really interested about the protocol is that there is a ledger (called blockchain) that is global, distributed, peer-to-peer that exists on every bitcoin wallet so that every bitcoin transaction clears publicly.
Second, I like bitcoin because it can be a currency. I want to pay for stuff using bitcoins and i’m way less likely to do this if the price is $300 one day and $1200 the next. I need it to be stable. I don’t want to “invest” in bitcoin, i want to use it. I don’t invest in US dollars, i use them. I want to do the same with bitcoins as i believe that this is the future of it. So, please stop treating it like a commodity (like gold).
I’m still getting used to it and i’m excited to see what applications are built to use it. I’ll be out there testing them