So I’ve been giving a lot of thought to BitCoin lately, because of a project I’ve been working on. The concept of a bitchain is what initially sparked my interest in the topic, as it has a number of uses outside of currency. I thought BitCoin == Gold Bugs. I’ve also read a lot of economics texts, and so I understand that money is just an agreed upon delusion that a group of people hold, and that’s why it works. The arguments about BitCoin have been primarily about whether we need another currency, but if instead you thought about BitCoin like a protocol, in a way. It’s a wire transform, or a bank transfer, or a cash exchange, or any other system. All of those have fees, hassles, risks, and advantages for each. BitCoin is that. As long as you and I have liquidity in and out of the system, then it is a way for me to send you money and you to receive it, without having to use a bank, or knowing each other, or traveling to meet each other. If that is worth something, then it is worth the effort to pay the fees to get in and out of the bitcoin system. Once you think about it like that, you realize that you don’t need to want to use BitCoin for it to be of value to you.
Think instead of being able to work around the BitCoin ecosphere as working to improve the lives of people in BitCoinIstan. You don’t have to want to move there, but there are people there, with needs, and they want stuff, and if you can provide services for them, they will pay for it.
That’s why I’m working to make BitCoin work better. Not because I need BitCoin, or I have a particular economic belief (other than, their currency is convertible into mine), but because there’s money there, and it works terribly in many cases, and it is easy to get paid in BitCoin. All of those things make me think opportunity.