Topic: Closed Thread - page 230. (Read 677683 times)

.................

Bitcoin took the form it did (a single large, global world internet currency) because of mining. Only the coin with the most hashing power can be secure. Bitcoin ended up being radically different than the intention many people had for cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin is still a stepping stone to the next stage. Bitcoin is priming the pump. Almost all the mined coins are pump and dumps. A very few of them are very innovative however.

There are groups of people of various sizes and they want to start their own digital currencies. They have looked at Bitcoin, but they cannot afford enough mining equipment to make it work. As soon as mining is eliminated and unnecessary, the landscape will change. You will see a lot of "community currencies", towns, websites and smaller groups like American Indians on reservations issuing their own coins. Every private Bitorrent tracker will have their own coin. You may even see companies begin to issues currencies to customers and suppliers.

These coins will be more local and relevant. Most of them will fail, but a few will make it. These coins are going to be inter-operable from day one. It wont matter if a merchant accepts Dogecoin or Litecoin or Bitcoin, whatever you have in your wallet will convert over at the spot price and users will not even think about it. Merchants may choose to hold profits in one currency and users may have a completely different set of currencies they hold. It will be a two-sided market.

There will not be a "litecoin ATM" or a "Bitcoin ATM", it will just be called an ATM. As routine transactions become automated, income, debt and credit will start to creep in. Very few people right now have income in Bitcoin and the things you can buy with Bitcoin are still limited, but that will change as we go into stage two.

Stage three will probably be an attack on the idea of currency itself. Bitcoin is a small technical achievement. Regulators can handle it. Libertarians were screaming and making scary noises about how "revolutionary" and "threatening" Bitcoin was and the regulators calmed down when they realized that Bitcoin is same as cash or gold. Its just another commodity. Bitcoin is not any more "threatening" than someone trading a gold ETF back and forth between two accounts. Governments will just put some reporting requirements on it and make sure they get their tax money when you buy anything.

Stage three is already laying the technical foundation for computer mediated systems of exchange that are radically and conceptually different than anything that has existed. Look at Ripplepay and the idea that money itself is just credit and debt. In Ripplepay money transcends its origin as a commodity and becomes a system of contracts and relations in a network. The role of money as a commodity inevitably becomes separated from the role of money as a unit of account.

Technology is enabling the creation of new objects, with new properties and relations that no previous object had. To own a gold bar is to possess it. To transfer ownership you physical move the bar into the possession of someone. In Bitcoin, "ownership" was transformed from its physical form, to knowledge. The "owner" of the Bitcoin is the one who "knows" the private key to authorize transfer of the Bitcoin.

If a coin is secured by two public keys, held by two parties and one party publishes the private key for their public key, the other person and now only that person can authorize the transfer of the coins. The "ownership" has changed without the coin having even moved. Merely the state of knowledge in the world has changed, without even touching the blockchain and yet the Bitcoin has changed hands.

Bitcoin would need a 2 trillion dollar marketcap to even represent one percentage point of global wealth (the foundation of security provided by the mining process will be severely threatened before we get there) . The end game is not 2 million dollar clone-coin pump and dumps. It is systems of exchange that will represent single or double percentage points of global assets and financial wealth. The correct investment horizon is probably five to twenty years.  In the excitement of two new coins launching every day, people are forgetting how far off the end goal is and underestimate the sacrifices required to get there.