You, Me, and BTC Your Liberty & Bitcoin Podcast
I’m glad Bitcoin has crashed (relatively) and I think you should be too. Actually, it's not that Bitcoin has crashed so much as the USD/BTC exchange rate has plummeted. That rate has absolutely nothing to do with the technology that is Bitcoin. Right now, Bitcoin is most prominently used as a medium of exchange, and for as long as someone is accepting it as a form of payment, Bitcoin itself has not crashed.
I think Andreas Antonopoulos gets at something important in this response to a Reddit AMA question about the price slump. No part of Bitcoin has crashed except a market of unprincipled greed, full of people who saw Bitcoin as no more than a way to make money for themselves. There’s nothing wrong with making money for the sake of making money, but I know that I will not particularly miss the people who left Bitcoin just because of a falling exchange rate.
I’d prefer to see people interested in Bitcoin as a way to increase the power of the free market, but I know that not everyone has a free market fetish. Fortunately, that's not a problem, because the technology found in Bitcoin has many different applications. In general, they can all be implemented without getting in the way with each other.
What I’m really trying to say is that hopefully this recent price slump will have cleared away some of the chaff. Hopefully now we can get back to using Bitcoin as a tool for making lives better and not just for making people rich. Hopefully this drop has scared off most of the investors who really don’t give two shits about Bitcoin’s ability to help the unbanked of the world. I see no problem with this and I’d like to think the community will be better off without those people. Money gained and lost so quickly doesn’t do much to endear Bitcoin to a wider audience.
Maybe this is naive, but I’d also like to think that with this price drop, Bitcoin can come back as a lean, mean, fiat-ass-kicking crypto machine, trimmed of those just riding along for the monetary gain. We need more innovators in this space, not more money, not more VCs, and not more regulation. Bitcoin does not need anyone trying to make it into another US stock exchange. We don’t need more restraints on our money, we don’t need more get rich quick schemes, we don’t need more of the same.
The world has been exposed to something truly new in Bitcoin. Let’s not fuck it up this time.
