Wednesday, January 20, 2016

Fork Bitcoin

I don't have a dog in the Bitcoin fight, but it's worth reading Fred Wilson's post for his (invested) perspective:
I’ve been writing about the Bitcoin blocksize debate here at AVC (the only place I write and I’m hard core about that) for the past year. It’s a big deal. At the core of the debate is whether the Bitcoin blockchain should be a settlement layer that supports a number of new blockchains that can be scaled to achieve various goals or whether the Bitcoin blockchain itself should evolve in a way that it can scale to achieve those various goals.

In my simple mind I liken it to this. Should Bitcoin be Gold or should Bitcoin be Visa. If it is Gold, it’s a store of wealth and something to peg value to. If it is Visa, then its a transactional network that can move wealth around the globe in a nanosecond
My understanding is that the politics of Bitcoin set is up as Gold initially. I've written elsewhere about why I think this model of money is incorrect, based on gold-standard thinking instead of understanding money as a way to track obligation (or "balance sheet" thinking). Bitcoin's value is from its distributed ledger technology, the blockchain, not particulars of how Bitcoin itself will or will not scale (ultimately, structurally it cannot be a store of value).

I don't know if Fred is on the Gold or Visa side, but personally, I think Visa is more likely to be valuable than Gold.