Bitcoin Has Started a Conversation That Is Long Overdue

Bitcoin mining, the process of solving problems for bitcoins, was always a slow-moving and low-gain system. It turns out that the "bitcoin-rush" is slowing even faster than we originally expected and that mining is increasingly becoming less profitable (especially when you factor in the money that people pay to buy "mining equipment").  But this shouldn't really be a surprise, considering that Bitcoin is setting itself up as a new form of currency.

I mean, we know that money is and probably always be a big focal point of any news system. People like money, we kind of need it to buy things that we want in a consistent way, and any time something new comes along that might disrupt what we normally expect to be the "normal" course of events, we really don't like that and we tend to question and analyze every little facet of it until we are content. The same thing happened with the mobile payments/mobile banking boom that happened in the early 2010-2012s, yet, we know that the US is not really into the mobile options afforded to us (at least compared to other countries). In fact, even some emerging economies, such as China, are not really excited about the mobile payments revolution. For the US, it's really an adoption and standardization issue-- if it was easy to use and consistent enough (from the user perspective and the merchant perspective) so that it was accessible, then it would gain more popularity than it has. But we live in an era of Google wallets, fabled Apple wallets, ISIS, PayPal, LevelUp and just about a million other private, white label options for mobile payments. The standardization is just not there yet.

On the other hand, China is putting a stop to the whole money thing because they realize that many of the biggest mobile payment firms (such as Alibaba and its payments arm Alipay) are responsible for moving a lot of that hard-earned Chinese currency abroad.

But we should really thank Bitcoin (intro to Bitcoin here) and all the mobile channels for bringing this to the forefront of the discussion. A discussion about money is long overdue! So let's start that conversation. Money as a thing will always have some commonalities: it's usually relatively rare (shells, gold, etc.), it gets increasingly rare as it gets adopted, it's usually something physical, something easily divisible, and something that is seen as valuable by multiple people. Bitcoin, according to these requirements is different because the physicality of it is based on a couple lines of code. The world's response to this very big difference will ultimately determine the success of Bitcoin in the long run.