Member-only story
The Biggest Misconception About Bitcoin
Understanding Bitcoin is hard. I have sucked down the rabbit hole in 2017 and two years of non-stop research later I’m only now starting to grasp its deeper implications.
So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that for most people — who may have only heard of it in passing once or twice — Bitcoin is still a completely foreign concept.
And when something is poorly understood it becomes so much easier for misinformation to spread.
A fundamental misunderstanding of Bitcoin is that its primary use case is for payments.
And this stops people from understanding Bitcoin’s true purpose.
What do I mean by this?
If you ask most people on the street (if they’ve heard of Bitcoin at all), they’ll tell you that it’s a different way to buy your coffee or pay for a service.
And most people who think of Bitcoin like this will dismiss it because it’s not actually better than PayPal, Apple Pay or credit cards at making everyday transactions easier.
People hear about the 7 transactions-per-second limit, the high fees and the irreversibility of transactions, and naturally, conclude that Bitcoin sounds pretty limited.
And then on top of that, you throw in that it sprung out of thin air 10 years ago, and that its price can fluctuate wildly day-to-day, and you can see why the idea of Bitcoin is so easy to dismiss.
From here it’s easy to state all the reasons why Bitcoin won’t work.
People ask why more isn’t being done to scale up its transaction rate, and, if this isn’t possible, why we’re not moving to another cryptocurrency where it is.
But the problem with this idea of ‘Bitcoin as payments’ is that it’s completely wrong.
For now, Bitcoin doesn’t need to have a high transaction rate, because it isn’t…
