Satoshi said Bitcoin was for “commerce on the internet” (the first four words of the Bitcoin whitepaper). Turns out she was right. But not in the way most people think – and probably not even in the way she imagined.
A naive interpretation of “commerce on the internet” is to imagine traditional e-commerce merchants accepting Bitcoin as a method of payment. That hasn’t happened for a bunch of reasons and still may not. Time will tell.
Another interpretation is that Bitcoin was designed for commerce on the dark web. While that use case happens, Bitcoin isn’t actually well-suited to it due to its transparency. And dark web commerce is now dwarfed by another type of commerce that's become the dominant use case.
And no, I’m not talking about Bitcoin as a “store of value.” There’s nothing wrong with thinking of Bitcoin as digital gold or investing/HODL’ing/trading it, but that’s not what “commerce” means (at least not to me).
So 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* (re-read prior tweet to see why this is kind of mind blowing).
In just the last couple years, billions of dollars in purchases of digital assets have been made with Bitcoin (and Ether).
So either Satoshi is/was playing n-dimensional chess and knew Bitcoin would become the settlement currency for an ecosystem of digital assets that Bitcoin itself would catalyze through its example.....or, more likely, Bitcoin and the broader cryptocurrency ecosystem has giving rise to an emergent “commerce” use case that no one, including Satoshi, could have predicted.
Yet this is exactly what any student of technology SHOULD have expected (hindsight is 20/20!). New mediums rarely succeed by transforming the old. They give rise to the new.
This notion of emergence has been talked about by people like @cdixon @fredwilson @naval @cburniske and others (hat tips to them!) But it’s no longer just about future potential, we can already see a full cycle where an emergent phenomenon has begun to fulfill Satoshi's vision.
Ultimately, the implication for everyone in the crypto/blockchain space is to continue to look ahead to (and create) *new forms of value* that are possible now that the internet has an open, bourgeoning economic infrastructure.
