My 2cents on the $17 billion future bet called ...

When I talk to people outside this craze, I do often start reminding them and myself e.g. how many once thought “2nd Life” will be the start of a revolution how we interact & communicate in the net (funny enough, it may come back now with VR/AR tech)…so while I have fallen in love with this craze called blockchain, I do try to keep in mind, we are still in an early phase.

So here are some of my thoughts regarding #bitcoin:

The mother of them all, bitcoin is still not a currency (as in currency is “a medium for exchange” as this is the most prominent use for a currency…there are others, but they do not seem as prominent for the definition to me)— and as it looks to me it has a challenging road ahead if it wants to become one.

It is a token created by a very sophisticated concept for a digital currency.
But the token clearly has not moved past the stage of an economical commodity such as gold — and actually gold is the best comparison I can come up with to what it is at this time:
You can buy/sell/mine it, but you can’t walk into your regular Joe’s shop or even Walmart/Tesco/Aldi and buy something with it.

And people seem to lean towards it more when they loose trust in their national currencies as a means of saving and/or currency systems/players. But they also lean away, again, when they regain trust or see a higher benefit in other commodities and/or their currencies…

I think, this also makes it hard to pin down reasons for the price fluctuation of the bitcoin as there are so many different cultures, markets, interests and ideologies involved.
It is the first globally mined commodity, after all.

To clarify this, two examples:

1. While everyone was looking at the prices exploding between end of December and early January, a look at the volumes of excchanges made between bitcoin and regular national (fiat) currencies, showed it was being traded dominantly in CNY (i.e. Chinese currency) those days, not USD or EUR or others…so from time to time you would encounter analysis, good interpretations and thoughts on what was going on — but from an American/European view of things…leading to misinterpretations…it really is a very complex thing, such a global commodity. ;-)

2. On the other hand inspired by an on the Top100 bockchain sites and then looking at the Google trends 2016 myself, most searches for “blockchain” and also for “bitcoin” were dominantly in Africa, especially in Nigeria.
   Looking at the last 5 years, it was even clearer (No1 Nigeria, No2 Ghana…).

Since I argued else looking at “mainstream data tracker” is hard when trying to analyse and interpret such a new and nerdy topic, let me give you my interpretation of this:
The crypto experts probably are not visible in measurements done by Google (through Google search and such), Alexa or other tracking methods/trackers. What we probably do see on Alexa and/or Google (whereas I personally would trust the data from Goolge to be leaning closer to reality than Alexa thanks to pure volume and search domination) are “mainstreamers” actions. Non-crypto experts.

So in these countries the interest for “bitcoin” and “blockchain” in the general population is significantly higher than in the US, Canada or any European countries. China and some other countries probably are also a data problem as at least Google has probably less volume/dominance there…

result from GoogleTrends for search volumes in all of 2016, worldwide for term "bitcoin" (as screenshotted in Feb2017; all rights Google)

Regarding the general population and its inclusion in the US and Europe, I do not think regular consumers will be happy and/or able to use private/public key setups…I remember PGP, how it took off with my developer friends while my email client showed weird icons…but it never reached mainstream…never.
Actually all my developer friends from then stopped using it at least when communicating with “non techies” like me ;-)

Also the prospect of loosing “all your money” with a hacked online wallet, corrupt hard-drive or lost USB stick seems a major blocker in terms of adaption by mass markets…

To be fair at least the team behind DASH (another crypto currency) seems to have taken the PGP part seriously enough to implement it into their concept & development and are to release (they say) a “consumer-ready” version (DASH Evolution) later/end of this year…this will definitely be an interesting approach as they already developed some good concepts and usecases like “instant send”. But of course every “simplification” could carry with it a loss of security.

But #DASH, #Ethereum, Monero, #Steem and so many other interesting blockchains and their individual pros/cons should be viewed at another time…maybe ;-)

This article was slightly adapted/changed and appeared first on Medium.com (which I think must merge with Steemit for any of both to succeed, but again - another story): https://medium.com/@SamLiban/my-2cents-on-the-18-billion-future-bet-called-blockchain-88862b61c4dc#.io8ms54o4