What The Pundits Are Still Missing About Bitcoin

Pundit Joe has changed his mind from thinking Bitcoin is completely useless to admitting that it’s at least very useful for buying drugs. Pundit Matt still thinks that’s not really very useful at all.

I don’t blame their narrow impressions; until recently I didn’t grok much more than that (besides the currency’s limited supply, which has no appeal to non-libertarian/Austrian types). But now that I understand Bitcoin a little better, I think pundits like Joe and Matt are still completely missing some of the more revolutionary and universally appealing aspects of the elegant but complex protocol behind the surging cryptocurrency. Bitcoin potentially solves several key weaknesses of the modern financial system that are more easily understood at the extreme ends of the scales.

Bitcoin is a quick, safe, and cheap way to transport very large sums of money. I’m not personally familiar with how hard it is to, say, instantly transfer thousands of dollars to a relative on another continent, although trying to do it with cash is clearly difficult. I don’t how long it takes for wired funds to settle, or how much it costs, or what banks you have to go through, or what information you have to provide. But I’m highly confident that it’s much easier with Bitcoin (especially on a Sunday) – essentially, you just enter the address and wait a few minutes for the next mine block to verify it. It’s difficult to overstate the possible value of lowing these barriers.

Bitcoin is a quick, safe, and cheap way to transport very small sums of money. This end of the spectrum I understand better. The light bulb went on for me when I saw redditors randomly tipping each other in cents and realizing there was basically nothing else like it. Credit cards have enabled the e-commerce explosion, but the overhead of transaction costs rules out tiny purchases. Even with miner fees for quicker verification, Bitcoin obliterates the current system’s minimum viable transaction level, which I think is bound to unlock a whole platform of previously infeasible business models.

Of course, the nearly feeless nature of Bitcoin transactions could appeal to retailers doing business of all sizes; it’s just easiest at the very large and very small levels to see the strengths of cryptocurrency’s cheap, instant, and secure transfers over the weaknesses of the existing system’s expensive, slow and insecure transfers.

Naturally, these advantages attract illicit activities among its early adopters, but as far as I’m concerned that’s beside the point. And cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, or whatever later supplants it, still face downside risks like scalability, the opportunity cost of relying on electricity, or the third-party add-ons necessary to encourage common adoption (Bitcoin transactions themselves are inherently secure, but storing the result is definitely not.)

But there are enough fundamental advantages that I don’t think optimism is only for the cranks and crackheads. The utopian dreams about ceding power from governments and bankers to the common man may be a little, well, utopian, but to dismiss the whole thing entirely risks sounding like the old doubters of the newfangled Internet who said “no online database will replace your daily newspaper.” Sometimes you just have to wait for the pundits to figure it out.

(Full disclosure: I currently possess 0.00001726 BTC as well as an undisclosed amount of USD.)