Bitcoin: A radical technology for everyone

It was a recurring cycle, lasting four years each: Bitcoin was created in 2009, reached its first peak in 2013 ($1,165), followed by a milestone of $ 20,000 in 2017. Four years later, this year, the alpha cryptocurrency reached $ 58,000, its highest point in its history.

Bitcoin cannot determined by its price

Bitcoin represents both an innovation and a revolution in the way we think about money in general, and the possibility of technological interventions in finance in particular. To say that Bitcoin (and, by extension, most decentralized cryptocurrencies), since its creation by the unknown Satoshi Nakamoto more than a decade ago, has created its own economic layer acting on top of the global economy, is not such an outlandish statement.

Today, more than ever, its influence is steadily transforming a world rife with the inefficiencies of the old monetary order. While the use of blockchain technology in cryptocurrencies is still largely misunderstood, it represents a shift in how the modern world understands what it means to have “value” in the fullest sense of the word.

Essentially, the notion that Bitcoin is “just a bubble” is a misinterpretation of its programming logic. Bitcoin, devoid of the traditional understanding of money, is essentially just data. Its final stock is 21 million, which is divided into its components – satoshi. Since the scale and speed of its spread is limited to blocks that are completed every ten minutes, Bitcoin is a fact incompatible with the perception of “just a bubble”: its reserves will one day be depleted, creating a shortage. As can be seen from the four-year pattern, the parameters by which Bitcoin adjusts its “value” directly depend on external incentives, relative to its underlying logic.

This characteristic is internal and unique to cryptocurrencies in general, and also distinguishes its economy from the traditional monetary order. The latter is limited by its reproductive capacity, while the former is limited by the value attributed to it by the user base. As long as users hold it or link it to real assets, its assigned monetary value will only fluctuate depending on the cycles of volatility, but will never be erased, because its software is managed by a decentralized system, immune to geopolitical and state interference.

Open world of financial innovation

The logic of its price fluctuations will stop at some point and, consequently, will steadily increase. The one who has X amount of BTC, over time, will increase the cost of their ownership by X orders of magnitude. This is where the promise of Bitcoin begins, as well as the cautionary statements made against it by skeptics.

In his 2017 book, Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life, urban theorist Adam Greenfield identified cryptocurrencies as the basis of a” computational value guarantee ” where, if communication is a largely human act, a community of users can agree on the quantitative value of a digital object. Bitcoin is one such object: although it is essentially an intangible and speculative asset, its value depends not only on its computational guarantee of value, but more on how its users agree to use it.

“Despite all the hype around Bitcoin, it is obvious that in its design, important issues of human interaction, cooperation and friendly communication are legislated at the level of the technological infrastructure. Its emergence in the global economy gives a disproportionate amount of power to these people and institutions who understand how it works and are best able to implement that understanding, ” Greenfield notes.

Market euphoria has propelled Bitcoin throughout these four-year cycles to its current glory, but the sense with which its users and institutions accepting its use value at scale continue to push it forward is a phenomenon in itself. Faced with legal and regulatory challenges, Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies have effectively created an entirely new economy that threatens to bring down the old one.

During the ups and downs, the Bitcoin community as a whole has remained committed to a decentralized future. While the true impact of current trends in institutional adoption of cryptocurrency remains to be seen, it can be said that the pace of current developments in blockchain and cryptocurrency is aimed at the same thing: making these technologies meaningful for everyone’s daily lives.