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February 04, 2014, 12:12:27 PM |
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If bitcoin (& cryptocurrency in general) is the internet of money, let's jump in the way back machine to the mid 80's....
Lynx was a dominant browser - all text
UNIX was the OS of the internet
D/ARPA Net had been around for about 20 years, yet no one knew much about it
BBS' were a step in building localized and then topic specific communities and making data useful and accessible
Users were trying to figure out this internet thing and see if it was cooler than the BBS world
AOL comes along and takes the BBS concept and creates a different graphical user experience. They ship millions of CD's, charge monthly for usage and then create an advertising driven business model. They get millions online to the AOL experience. Then the Internet blossoms and AOL must morph from it's own experience to a broader experience that was being created.
What was the tipping point? Coming up with a browser that made the Internet come alive and made it useful and usable to people who didn't understand Unix and who didn't like AOL flood of pop ups. Netscape comes along 10 years later.
Netscape went on to create software - name servers, web servers, and their browser continued to proliferate to make the internet useful to more and more people. I see Bitcoin in the AOL stage. Adopted by geeks and techies first, who know they are onto something, but cryptocurrency is still in it's infancy. ATM's merchants, miners - all creating a community, like AOL, to give people a place to kick the tires and figure it out.
I am as excited as anyone about cryptocurrency, decentralized processing, accessibility to money and currency, and all of the seismic potential of this thing. I was just starting my career in the early 90's and was part of the internet taking hold and evolving into what it has become. Models will emerge, models have yet to even be conceived.
To that end we need the catalysts to spark something and broaden adoption. Will it be hardware? Short term, probably. More hashing=more bitcoin. More bitcoin to more people = distributed decentralized currency. More ways to get and use bitcoin is what I believe we need to make this thing go and the channels are opening up. Exchanges, ATMs, merchant services, all looking at and adopting more and more.
The reason Wi-Max didn't explode like people thought it would was backwards compatibility with the carrier networks. In essence WiMax was an awesome new technology that was asking companies to abandon billions of dollars in investments over a century in their infrastructure to make it work. HUGE oversight by the engineers. It may be awesome but you gotta sell it. You don't sell it by telling someone they need to shoot their family to use the new awesome.
I see one of the largest challenges being the integration with other forms of currency and backwards compatibility or integration with them to insure success, or bitcoin will go the way of Betamax or DAT. Good news is we are on our way, adoption is increasing and proliferation will happen. How fast depends on how useful it can be made to the greatest number of people. In other words scale. If it scales, it'll be ok. If it scales and plays nice with others, then it will fix a lot of issues in the system.
Thoughts? Opinions?
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