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.
Bitcoin is a currency, bitcoin is a network, bitcoin is a technology and you can't separate these things. A consensus network that bases its value on the currency does not work without the currency.
Blockchain assets derive value from their usefulness. Bitcoin has value because people value the payment network. BTC is required to use the network, so people demand it. If Bitcoin continues to be useful, it will continue to have value.
When you think about 'World of Warcraft' as a social network, and you think about the future version of Battle.net as Blizzard's social network, then you wanna stay connected to your social network.
Bitcoin is both disruptive from a technology perspective, but there's a tremendous power of social good behind it. So you can both build a cool business or have a great investment return, and there's the promise of potentially improving the remittance industry or banking the unbanked.
When the actual Bitcoin network launched in 2009, no one knew about it, and many of those who did thought it would surely fail. Just to make sure the thing worked, the scripting language in Bitcoin was intentionally extremely restrictive.
BitCoin is actually an exploit against network complexity. Not financial networks, or computer networks, or social networks. Networks themselves.
Within the coming years, disrupting the Bitcoin network will become increasingly more difficult as Bitcoin wallet software and the protocol become more mature and resilient.
Bitcoin offers one service: securely time-stamped, scripted transactions. Everything else is built on the edge-devices as an application. Bitcoin allows any application to be developed independently, without permission, on the edge of the network.
One of the things I learned is that you've got to deal with the underlying social problems if you want to have an impact on crime - that it's not a coincidence that you see the greatest amount of violent crime where you see the greatest amount of social dysfunction.
I've always been a social network retard, even before there was a social network. People would say, "You want to go to this party and do some networking?"
When the social network doesn't find it convenient to have privacy, we say, "Okay, social network, you don't want privacy, maybe we won't have it either." But we did this without having the conversation.
Isn't the purpose of bitcoin mining simply to get rich - or not, as the case may be? Well, at 21, we are less concerned with bitcoin as a financial instrument and more interested in bitcoin as a protocol - and particularly in the industrial uses of bitcoin enabled by embedded mining.
Because the supply of Bitcoin is limited, the price of Bitcoin is going to have to increase and increase very substantially over time. My advice is that if you're interested in Bitcoin and excited by Bitcoin, then buy some Bitcoin and hold onto them, and you're likely to do very well over time.
At first, I didn't really use anything in the social network world. I was so anti-social network, which is kind of ironic. I actually first started on a chat room on my fan site.
Social media allows you to network, collaborate, and share your work with others. Building a solid network via social is the most valuable thing you can do for your business or personal brand.