Bitcoin

Countless people must migrate to support family. The cost to remit? An entire month's pay.

Bitcoin—as a global, free, instantaneous payment rail—will help many expatriate families retain hard-earned income.

Essentially free and instantaneous to Skype anywhere on Earth—but sending $300 internationally takes days and costs a meaningful chunk.

What *are* people buying with Bitcoin that dwarfs its use in traditional e-commerce and on the dark web? Remarkably, the answer is something that DIDN’T EVEN EXIST when the Bitcoin paper was published and ONLY EXISTS NOW *because* it was published.

The answer is that, so far, the primary “commerce” use case emerging for Bitcoin is to buy *other digital assets*.

In just the last couple years, billions of dollars in purchases of digital assets have been made with Bitcoin (and Ethereum). . . . Bitcoin and the broader cryptocurrency ecosystem has giving rise to an emergent “commerce” use case that no one, including Satoshi, could have predicted.

Bitcoin is something that is natural, decentralized, uncontrolled and digital. This is something that didn’t exist before Satoshi invented it in 2008 and I would argue, doesn’t exist with any other cryptocurrency. This is the key to Bitcoin’s usefulness as money. Scarcity is the first thing that’s required without which its proposition as money crumbles.

[Bitcoin is] going to be what it has always been—open source money. Utilization will grow by push and pull. We’ll push Bitcoin to users by building truly delightful user experiences and applications—I see those being built, albeit slowly. And on the pull side, there will be groups of people who seek out Bitcoin, who are willing to overlook the current limitations and the learning curve because it’s a matter of life and death for them. Choice is an incredibly powerful and sometimes destabilizing force.

BTC a year ago 300k txs, now 170k
LTC a year ago 2k txs, now 40k
ETH a year ago 50k txs, now 750k
ETC a year ago 20k txs, now 100k
BCH a year ago 0 txs, now 20k

BTC dominance a year ago 90%, now 45%...

A substitute good is one good that can be used instead of another....

BTC/LN ~ TCP/IP
Bitcoin is becoming a platform—a protocol stack with many features:
- store of value
- low trust wealth transfer
- confidential transactions
- tokenized securities
- high volume payment network
- microtransactions
- smart contracts / programmable money

The pace of innovation in Ethereum > the pace of innovation in Bitcoin.

Bitcoin was an important part of getting this technology recognised, largely through the socially-sensitive MVP of a currency. However it didn’t really capture the imagination of developers in general.

The more new chains launch with massive issues (including some with huge budgets) the more impressive it is that bitcoin has never had any similar catastrophes, over a much longer period.

1) Bitcoin alone now routinely moves hundreds of millions of dollars per day
2) Yet some say there are “no use cases” for crypto

Key point: not all of that volume is trading. At least some is for paying remote workers, international remittances, etc.

Bitcoin is aiming to be a store of value. Architectural stability, network security, network effects, decentralization, wide acceptance all matter. It’s currently the best of an imperfect bunch on those characteristics.

The Internet enables decentralized distribution of data. Bitcoin enables decentralized proof and transfer of ownership.

Bitcoin as a payment system is just one of the potential applications of the network. To cap Bitcoin’s value here would be like saying that the Internet, in the early days, was only as valuable as its ability to send email in a more efficient way than fax or snail mail. Bitcoin is valuable as a currency because of the economic efficiencies the Bitcoin network is already creating as transactions flow over it. As with the Internet, more applications will flourish which will make the Bitcoin network, and thus Bitcoin as a currency, valuable.

Adam Smith called capital "stored labor". Bitcoin is literally stored computational labor (stored Hashcash)

Bitcoin is one of the most important inventions of all time and has launched a global movement. It's awesome to see an entire ecosystem spring up around it, but Bitcoin is my first love. Bitcoin remains the most popular asset on Coinbase among new customers and longtime hodlers alike. It's great to see steady progress continue, including lightning network adoption and more. I believe we’re still at the beginning. The white paper signaled the start of a movement and the full promise of Bitcoin is still yet to be realized.