What is the broader significance of Bitcoin in economics and technology?
Cryptocurrency
Asked by Question Bot06/Jun/20161 answer
1 Answer
F
Faisal Khan
Answered 06/Jun/2016
To be very honest, we don't know. If you are talking about Bitcoin (the protocol), the use-cases (at present) are almost endless. We can take some many current scenarios and juxtapose them on to the Bitcoin protocol &/or blockchain and marvel at its beauty.
We would talk about how easy and friction-free or government-free the money aspect of Bitcoin is. The possibility of sending across $0.00001 to $ 1,000,000 with ease and hardly any transaction fees.
We could talk about how it is the currency for the 21st century, riding on the TCP/IP protocol, where everybody contributes, etc.
The truth is, Bitcoin is like the Internet invented again. Imagine back in 1992 when the Browser came out, could we have imagined Facebook, or that Netscape would go bust and IE would emerge and then be taken over the likes of Chrome and Firefox. Could we have fathomed an app like Twitter or Uber? Would we have seen the use-case of streaming video and YouTube? Could we have predicted the ease at which we would be able to pay each other? The answer is debatable, but for many, we could not fathom.
Bitcoin is the same. I firmly believe the use-cases for Bitcoin are yet to come. They are yet to be defined. A couple of years down the road we will be having applications on Bitcoin we could not have thought possible. Fractional-Ownership will be a huge play. Imagine being able to buy 1/100th of an Ounce of Gold. How buying $358 worth of Berkshire Hathaway Shares or $18 worth of Apple/Google shares. Such ownership status is simply not available today.
Just in this arena alone (Fractional Ownership) you will see a massive shift of how financial products, equities markets and other instruments for investment and savings would change.
Universally we all tend to agree that Bitcoin is a game-changing technology. How we will implement it and use it is opaque right now and would become more clearer as time passes. Many brilliant minds, ideas and money would be put to the test, and it would be interesting to see which ideas will blossoms and which ideas will go bust.
We would talk about how easy and friction-free or government-free the money aspect of Bitcoin is. The possibility of sending across $0.00001 to $ 1,000,000 with ease and hardly any transaction fees.
We could talk about how it is the currency for the 21st century, riding on the TCP/IP protocol, where everybody contributes, etc.
The truth is, Bitcoin is like the Internet invented again. Imagine back in 1992 when the Browser came out, could we have imagined Facebook, or that Netscape would go bust and IE would emerge and then be taken over the likes of Chrome and Firefox. Could we have fathomed an app like Twitter or Uber? Would we have seen the use-case of streaming video and YouTube? Could we have predicted the ease at which we would be able to pay each other? The answer is debatable, but for many, we could not fathom.
Bitcoin is the same. I firmly believe the use-cases for Bitcoin are yet to come. They are yet to be defined. A couple of years down the road we will be having applications on Bitcoin we could not have thought possible. Fractional-Ownership will be a huge play. Imagine being able to buy 1/100th of an Ounce of Gold. How buying $358 worth of Berkshire Hathaway Shares or $18 worth of Apple/Google shares. Such ownership status is simply not available today.
Just in this arena alone (Fractional Ownership) you will see a massive shift of how financial products, equities markets and other instruments for investment and savings would change.
Universally we all tend to agree that Bitcoin is a game-changing technology. How we will implement it and use it is opaque right now and would become more clearer as time passes. Many brilliant minds, ideas and money would be put to the test, and it would be interesting to see which ideas will blossoms and which ideas will go bust.