The reason Bitcoin refuses to “die”, is because it represents a genuine technological breakthrough in payments. The reason it hasn’t been exposed as a “ponzi scheme”, is because it isn’t one.
Earlier today, I came across a very powerful quote on Twitter by Erik Voorhees:
From my own personal experience, I have found the above sentiment to be completely true.
The more people actually look into Bitcoin, rather than simply dismiss it with superficial judgments, the more people recognize its incredible potential. A recent case in point seems to be Spencer Rascoff, CEO of online real estate database Zillow.
As Coindesk points out, last November Rascoff said on Bloomberg TV:
“I am sceptical of bitcoin. I just think there’s too much shadiness associated with the currency that’s not maintained by some sort of government or central bank. And I think it will blow up at some point, with some big scandal where someone loses 50, a 100 million dollars, and I don’t think it is going to be here in five years.”
Well, $475 million in customer funds have been lost via the Mt. Gox debacle and, despite some wild prices swings, there ultimately has been zero price impact. To borrow a phrase from Nassim Taleb, Bitcoin is the definition of anti-fragile.
It seems that time (and a conversation with Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong) has changed his tune. Yesterday, the Zillow CEO Tweeted:
Meanwhile, just last week the co-founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, tweeted the following:
Wales subsequently posted a BTC address and the unsolicited donations started flooding in. I guess this was the Bitcoin community’s way of demonstrating its power (just as it did with the $28k recently donated to Dorian Nakamoto). By the end of today, the donations had climbed to over $11k. He tweeted:
While increased mainstream adoption by influential individuals is important, merchant adoption is equally key, and good news on this front has continued with today’s announcement by Big Fish that it will use Coinbase to accept payments in BTC.
So what’s Big Fish?
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Right off the bat, I want to make it completely clear that I first became attracted to Bitcoin from an entirely ideological perspective. Having worked on Wall Street for ten years, I saw first hand the immorality, destructiveness and criminality inherent in our current monetary and financial system. In fact, I became so disillusioned and disgusted with the industry I resigned from a lucrative job in January 2010. Thus began a long journey in which I looked for answers anywhere I could, in most cases finding very few. It wasn’t until I came across Bitcoin and recognized its revolutionary force for good that I became far more optimistic about our future as a species.