Bitcoin Has A Purpose

Fundamentally I dislike injustice, I am also a bigger believer in reality. However the life we are born into isn't perfectly fair and therein lies a problem.

I started this article on a philosophical note, as although I am an Engineer (Electronics and Software), I consider myself a person first of all. It is also very important in Engineering to know the why before considering how.

For years as an average adult, I had heard the societal complaints about the banking and finance systems. The complaints were of a grumbling nature about how the ills of the large and complex financial system were unchangeable facts about modern society that we had to accept. The financial crisis of 2008 was an example of an event that effectively nobody seemed to be able to anticipate and prevent. The financial system was essentially an unnecessarily complex and therefore dangerous beast that we couldn’t control.

Then bitcoin arrived. A means of exchange of value that did not depend on a central authority. Its main premise was to serve as a store of the network-securing value the miners provide. This value can then be traded to anyone else, for border-free digital trading. From then on its use as a store and exchange of value can proceed as a normal currency. Its arrival as a project among those with high level technical knowledge meant it did not make much of a splash upon arrival. Even upon increasing popularity, it was met with dismissal by some. I remember reading an article in 2017 that luckily is still alive on the internet that I have been able to dig up for your reading pleasure today. From the Financial Times:

Title?: Bitcoin passes $1,000 but only number that matters is zero and the sub title?: Cryptocurrency trading not even a rounding error in the world of modern finance. Please give the article a read.

Unfortunately the condescending, mocking tone and puzzling comparisons of the article is an idea of what bitcoin initially faced. Years later and it was serious enough that the financial incumbents were calling for regulation.

Bitcoin showed what is possible, and it showed idealism still has a place in reality. Understandably it isn’t perfect. A lot of people hold it as an investment not a currency, though considering the Forex market exists, that seems to be par for the course. Bitcoin has also made some crime easier, and the centralization of mining power may not be ideal, but still Bitcoin has been a light. It has spawned many other cryptocurrency projects and introduced change to the degree that even though it is not perfect, it has been an outstanding success as is. It has brought about a fairer system, re-introducing the idea that money can simply be a tool for exchange and store of value. And for its imperfections, it is my hope that a new, or existing, cryptocurrency can offer a cure.

For most in politics, especially activist politics, there is a moment, a book or speech or some other event, that radicalized them. A famous, but sad, example would be the flames that ignited the Arab Spring.

In a way Bitcoin did something similar for me. It sparked a wave of thought in my mind. The initial excitement in 2017 when I found Bitcoin, the idea that you could just email money to people, and that it was up to people to decide what a fair exchange of goods or services for that Bitcoin was, and is, still really cool to me.

I don’t know if the creator(s) of Bitcoin ever knew it would be this big, but as I saw something finally taking on the Financial System, I began to think, what other system or company with problems that is socially accepted as impossible to overcome, could actually be overcome?