| Title | Entrepreneur: Why We Should Take Bitcoin Seriously | |
| Date | Saturday November 22 2014, @07:06PM | |
| Author | janrinok | |
| Topic | ||
| from the first-they-mock-you dept. | ||
Wences Casares, founder and CEO of Xapo, a Bitcoin storage company, has posted another gentle guide to Bitcoin. Rather than a wide-ranging FAQ (like this one), Casares tackles the overriding question in many people's minds: why should the world take the word of Bitcoiners that their "currency" will eventually win broad acceptance as a means of exchange around the world?
Casares goes over the main attributes of currency systems that historically have proven successful. Rather than start with copper coins or gold nuggets, he changes things up a bit by introducing us to the Micronesian island of Yap, where residents used stones for money; his LinkedIn piece reads like a business book parable but was apparently based on actual history. The stones worked, says Casares, because they were scarce (to the islanders), durable, came in different size denominations for convenience, and could be easily exchanged in commerce.
One idiosyncracy of the Yap system was that high denomination stones (huge boulders) were not actually moved, but left in place, and understood to belong to a certain individual; even stones that were lost during transport by canoe would be honored by the villagers' recollection. While this detail arguably doesn't add much to Casares' argument, it's a nice storyteller's touch.
Of course, there have been a number of major changes in currency systems through the ages, including the invention of paper money by the Chinese, and the introduction of credit cards in the 20th century. Casares compares Bitcoin against cash and gold using the aforementioned criteria (durability, scarcity, etc). He then explains why a technology such as Bitcoin is necessary for frictionless worldwide commerce:
Money is information, but while information has become freer and faster, money is still much harder to move than information. With the costless stroke of a key, someone in Chicago can send an email to someone in Jakarta in real time. Yet, if that same person in Chicago wants to send ¢1 to the same person in Jakarta, it could take days or weeks to get there, not to mention cost anywhere from ¢50 to $50. So while money is and always has been information, the information revolution has really not changed money much at all – electronic money continues to have many of the disadvantages of physical money.
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printed from SoylentNews, Entrepreneur: Why We Should Take Bitcoin Seriously on 2024-04-20 02:17:00