Financial transaction most rare of this century, up to this point, took place on May 22, 2010. It does not involve Wall Street, or the City of London; It happened in Jacksonville, Florida. This does not accentuate the obligation debt warranted, or credit default swaps. It was the purchase of two pizza Papa John, in Exchange for payments whose value is now reaching US $4 million.

But the most remarkable of the transaction that is the decision of the provider's pizza, Jeremy Sturdivant aged 18 years, that the compensation she received 10,000-unit currency of the new born, someone called from the ether of the Internet. , and is not supported by the bank or the country-deserves to be eaten and the cheese. The pepperoni pizza was the first real world bitcoin transactions.
Blockchain Buzzword Bingo

It has become de rigueur for the past year to talk to agree with blockchains, the technology which the Bitcoin is built, and is not indifferent towards Bitcoin itself. The Financial Timesmenulis panting about bank "race to harness the power of blockchain it." Forbes of interest: "everyone seems to agree that the technology would disrupt financial services." But Bitcoin itself? This sister is weird, ugly stepchildren, players who will be named later. Someone's got a different understanding that everyone would feel better if it just went away.

For software engineers like me, this all seems very strange and unreal. Blockchain is simply a data structure. An interesting and powerful, granted, but not revolutionary in and of itself. Imagine the headlines praising the "startup" list of links or proclaimed "B-trees will change banking." Wouldn't it be kitaseharusnya people who confuse the technology with valuable application?
Allow me to suggest a perverse thought, a violation of the new conventional wisdom. What if the Bitcoin is more important than blockchain? How to jikadidesentralisasi, without the permission of Bitcoin is to block the financial services was almost exactly like what is the internet to the intranet of the company twenty years ago?

Bitcoin Errors

Why precious bitcoin? For the same reason, the precious gold. Why is gold valuable? Not for himself. Those who talk about the "gold standard" as if its value is an axiomatic nature, and not a collective hallucination, forget that the value of one ounce of gold is far more calculated than intrinsic. If we value the gold only for glitter, suppleness, and konduktivitasnya, its value will be much cheaper.

What has made the gold so precious for centuries is that it's good to be precious, something that, as it turns out, is very difficult. Gold is difficult to counterfeit; easy to fix, merge, divide, and transport; and very rare. (All the gold ever mined would not fill four Olympic-sized swimming pools.) It is these attributes, and only these attributes, which make the gold as a medium of Exchange, unit of account, and the effective value of the storage ... or, more simply, money.

Please note that Bitcoin meets all these criteria also in spades.

Cypherpunk Alchemist has been looking for a digital gold for decades. Once found, we now expect ordinary people to understand the meaning. This is a mistake. Most people shouldn't use the bitcoin. They don't use gold. They have not (yet) need to "smart contracts", the most original aspect of the Bitcoin and interesting. The only reason for normal people to use the bitcoin in their daily lives is if they have been betrayed by their country and its currency.

But it's not that Bitcoin is no problem. Because often, ordinary people a glimpse of the rusty machine, terparuhnya, the 20th century under the sleek facade of the global financial system, and the system is ready to perform the Bitcoin as did the Internet against your phone remotely. .

Unglobalized

Steampunk inability of that system is most obvious when we travel. Have you ever had to transfer money internationally, and fired with a considerable cost and exchange rates are terrible? Have you ever tried to understand why such transfers require long hours or even several days, when the ATM is functioning at once? ... And then, when You melakukanmenggunakan the international ATM, you've found yourself paying five dollars, above even more buruktukar?

This is getting worse. Have you ever met people who can't use their debit card outside of their own country? Have you ever been to a country where the majority of the inhabitants are not benefitting? Have you ever had to change money on the black market? Have you ever left a country and find a handful of currencies which is basically worthless, cannot be changed, so you leave its borders? Have you ever had to deal with export controls, or hyperinflation?

I have seen all these things-I've spent a lot of time traveling in developing countries-and I have seen how billions of people have to deal with them. (Chinadan India implementing currency controls. The World Bank estimates that 250 million migrants migrants on this planet sending $583 billion in 2014.)

Do you know what is essentially immunize you from all of the above? Gold. And, increasingly, bitcoin. What's more, bitcoin can do many things that cannot be done in gold ... like a journey across the world, from one person to another, without intermediaries, in a matter of minutes.

Killer application

The financial industry probably will, with infinite wisdom, build killer apps blockchain. I don't deal with it. But it seems very strange to overlook the fact that a person is already there, and have been really generate $6 billion value of zero.

So, I'm not too keen on the initiative of blockchain major banks or corporate-consortium, or other applications that claim to be revolutionary because they use a particular data structure. (I'm interested in the transformative initiatives like the Ethereum, but it's more than just blockchain.) I am also not interested in applications that expect regular folks using bitcoin.

What I am interested is an application trying to use Bitcoin to replace sklerotik, our global financial pipeline masking tape. Freemit, led by John Biggs of TechCrunch itself. Align Commerce, funded by Kleiner Perkins. Blockstream, a company devoted to extend the limit on all of the bitcoin, and the first iteration of their sidekains initiatives. Don't look blockchain a big bank initiative for future payments.