“Bitcoin is an experiment and like all experiments, it can fail.”
This is not about if bitcoins failed, when was the last time we heard a technology fail? Bitcoins as a monetary system might have flunked a little, but hey that’s what money is all about. Right from the beginning of bringing currency into our lives, there had always been philosophers preaching the transient nature of money. There should have always been a solution for the IF.
Every problem has a solution and every solution has a problem
What was the problem with fiat money that there was a need to bring in the technology? If we look back closely, there was one fundamental idea that was used to market the idea of bitcoins as a digital currency and it was “Decentralisation”
Just read the sentence again, “fundamental idea” and “to market”. It is evident that bitcoin was just an idea to change or disrupt the existing ecosystem which had this problem, and usually these creative ideas are considered solutions. And that’s how bitcoin (technically blockchain)started to gain attraction!
What problems can a solution of this global scale can have? There we go, we have the answer in the question. Scaling it globally was the actual problem, people’s mind in general has an inertia to a change, and once the inertia was removed by the external force (marketing) then the newton’s second law continued in motion. Wait! unless and until an external unbalanced force acts upon it, but in the case of the bitcoins I believe it was the internal unbalanced force that stopped the motion.
The core team had been there since the beginning (or atleast since the beginning), they were the internal force that was setting up the motion of bitcoins and inspite of facing obstacles from the external forces, namely the governmental norms in various countries, the hacking incidents, sustainability issues, altcoins, etc they raised at a steady rate. I guess the pressure got too much from the outside that there were clashes internally for everyone to claim their rightful space and eventually at one point someone had to stop before the bubble burst. Well that’s a serious problem within the solution providers!
The fate of Bitcoins as a Startup
As investments are poured in, you tend to scale up faster than expected without even covering the existing customer base, when bitcoins first started there were so many initiatives taken to ensure that it reached people, and even now it is sticking to the same set of people who were there at the beginning. Every then and now, there is a media post about the bitcoin technology then the you see a raise in the price.
In a technology as anonymous as bitcoins where even the founders wish to remain anonymous, nobody should be able to blame anyone. Over the years bitcoin was neither treated as a currency nor as a technology (again referring to the block chain), but as a sort of investments, especially with so many startups that tried to grab their share of the bitcoin pie, bitcoin became more synonymous to startup industry. What happens if a startup co-founder does not believe in the company anymore and writes a blog about it? The butterfly flaps its wings in one corner of the world, and you get an earthquake in the entire internet.
Who decides if Bitcoins is a failure?
The majority of awareness about the technology as a whole have stuck only to investors and entrepreneurs, the common crowd for whom the currency was originally designed out might be reading about a failed experiment and branding it a failure without even getting to use it!
Let’s get to the very basics, we all must have heard of the first generation computers, the humongous, time consuming, heat spitting machine which did basic operations, what if one of the founding members or Charless Babbage himself had branded it a failure? Okay Charles Babbage was known founder, so let’s try something as anonymous as the internet itself and see how it had evolved over a short span of 2 decades. Those are the real success stories behind technology, you have to give it time to evolve. So far the only judges behind the success or a failure of a technology is the consumers and not any core team.
From a consumer’s point of view
I’m not judging, it is essential not to let a failed experiment out to the consumers, but don’t call it a failure when your beta test was already well received. Of course, there are times when you have to face a few unexpected problems (internal and external) while addressing the same technology to a large scale audience (globally in this case), it doesn’t mean we can give up on the technology. Can it succeed in it’s mission, that we cannot predict; but we can surely do our best in saving it from a failure!
P.S. This is neither a conspiracy theory nor an expert’s point of view on bitcoins, but just a mere humble inference from a spectator who loves the idea of having one currency for the internet community – divided as nations, united by the internet!
Also check out: 10 Bitcoins Facts That Every Digital Savvy Person Must Know!
