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| comment | | "parent_author":"",<br>"parent_permlink":"blockchain",<br>"author":"waqqasalvi",<br>"permlink":"atvalue-focusedhotelsthefreebreakfastgetsbigger-f2ph953per",<br>"title":"At Value-Focused Hotels,<br> the Free Breakfast Gets Bigger",<br>"body":"Not because I missed the great run-up (though I did) and not because I fear that the bitcoin bubble will end badly (it will,<br> but that\u2019s not my problem). Rather,<br> it is because I have been waiting for decades for someone to invent a purely digital currency,<br> a currency for online purchases that wasn\u2019t linked to a credit card. It was the killer app that no one ever figured out.\r\n\r\nThus when bitcoin first emerged,<br> I had hoped that it would be The One. In \u201cDigital Gold,<br>\u201d his book about bitcoin\u2019s origins,<br> Nathaniel Popper quotes an email from Satoshi Nakamoto,<br> the cryptocurrency\u2019s mysterious and possibly apocryphal inventor,<br> \u201cI\u2019ve been working on a new electronic cash system that\u2019s fully peer-to-peer,<br> with no trusted third party.\u201d\r\n<blockquote>That\u2019s how all the early bitcoin enthusiasts thought of it\u00a0a currency,<br> one that allowed consumers to buy things.<\/blockquote>\r\nThat\u2019s how all the early bitcoin enthusiasts thought of it \u2014 a currency,<br> one that allowed consumers to buy things while sidestepping both the banking system and national governments. What the bitcoin bubble shows,<br> however,<br> is that bitcoin is just another e-currency failure. But I\u2019m getting ahead of myself.\r\n\r\nI first began thinking about digital currency in the mid-1990s when I met a brilliant cryptographer and mathematician named David Chaum,<br> who had invented what he called electronic cash,<br> or e-cash. It did exactly what bitcoin purports to do \u2014 allow people to use virtual money,<br> stored on their computer,<br> to make purchases and send money to other people.\r\n\r\n<img src=\"https:\/\/source.unsplash.com\/collection\/765150\/1280x851\" alt width=\"1280\" height=\"851\" \/><br>\r\n\r\nChaum was way ahead of his time. He founded his company,<br> DigiCash,<br> five years before the creation of either Netscape,<br> which popularized the browser,<br> or Amazon. By 1998,<br> DigiCash was bankrupt.\r\n\r\nWhat followed was the short-lived \u201cinformation wants to be free\u201d era. Napster,<br> which was founded in 1999,<br> used peer-to-peer technology that allowed music lovers to download songs illegally. Newspapers didn\u2019t have paywalls,<br> and many people came to assume that news shouldn\u2019t cost anything. I saw my own children downloading music and even movies,<br> and when I would tell them they were violating the law,<br> they would tell me I didn\u2019t understand how the world worked in the internet age.\r\n<blockquote>As e-commerce took hold,<br> the only means of payment was a credit card.<\/blockquote>\r\nAs e-commerce took hold,<br> the only means of payment was a credit card. It was a real commercial friction point: every time you wanted to buy something you had to fill out your credit card information,<br> plus your billing address and,<br> if it was different,<br> your shipping address as well. And once you had done that,<br> your information would be vulnerable to hackers.\u00a0Electronic currency could have solved both these problems. If my children had access to a digital currency \u2014 maybe their allowance! \u2014 Napster could have struck deals with the record companies and charged for songs. They would have happily paid. And e-cash would have made internet commerce pretty darn close to frictionless. By 2000,<br> the chief executive of an internet bank was saying,<br> \u201cWe\u2019ve reached the point where the internet economy needs e-cash.\u201d\r\n\r\nIt never happened. Instead,<br> entrepreneurs and companies created a series of workarounds,<br> some better than others. The best-known was PayPal,<br> which essentially accessed your bank or credit card account to make purchases or send money. Apple and Amazon have also made it much easier to pay for things; when I want to pay for my monthly Washington Post subscription,<br> I hit the \u201cAmazon Pay\u201d button and it\u2019s done. Even so,<br> we still spend an awful lot of time filling out credit card information when we want to buy something online.\r\n\r\n<img src=\"https:\/\/source.unsplash.com\/collection\/765150\/342x591\" alt width=\"208\" height=\"359\" \/><br>Meanwhile,<br> every effort to come up with an electronic currency foundered. I remember one called Qpass and another called WebPay. In the early 2000s,<br> e-gold emerged as a potential solution,<br> until it turned out that it was being used primarily by criminals. In 2008,<br> its founder pleaded guilty to money laundering.\r\n\r\nAccording to the website\u00a099bitcoins.com,<br> there are 89 companies that claim to accept bitcoin as currency,<br> including Subway,<br> the Massachusetts Institute of Technology bookstore,<br> and the Museum of the Coastal Bend in Victoria,<br> Texas. But I can\u2019t imagine anyone actually using it to pay for something. Who would use bitcoin for a purchase when it might go up by $500 in the next 10 minutes? And who would accept bitcoin when it could go down by $500 in the next 10 minutes?\r\n\r\nWhatever the original intention,<br> bitcoin has morphed into an asset whose only purpose is speculation. \u201cThere is simply no way to predict what it will be worth,<br>\u201d said Pete Kight,<br> a \u201cfintech\u201d (financial technology) investor who founded Checkfree in 1981. That is its fatal flaw as an electronic currency.\r\n\r\nOr,<br> rather,<br> that is one of them. The other flaw is the very quality that many of its adherents love most about it: It operates separately from the government\u2019s fiat currency. \u201cI call it the tyranny of brilliance,<br>\u201d said Kight. \u201cWhen you work in fintech,<br> you often see engineering genius get out of synch with what works in the real world.\u201d\r\n\r\nIn the case of bitcoin,<br> he said: \u201cThere is this thing called the Federal Reserve. Its first job is to protect the financial system of the United States. For a cryptocurrency to be successful,<br> it has to work out with the Fed how it won\u2019t undermine the banking system.\u201d\r\n\r\nI can imagine that after the bubble bursts,<br> bitcoin will continue to be traded. Maybe a few of the other cryptocurrencies will have similar trajectories (though most will dissolve into nothingness). I can see it reflecting the larger economy in some way,<br> rising in certain environments and falling in others. In the best case,<br> bitcoin might come to be seen as the digital equivalent of gold.\r\n\r\nThere\u2019s nothing wrong with that. But we\u2019ll have to wait a little longer for an electronic currency that works.<br \/><center><hr\/><em>Posted from my blog with <a href='https:\/\/wordpress.org\/plugins\/steempress\/'>SteemPress<\/a> : https:\/\/coinpick.today\/tie-world\/tie-foods\/at-value-focused-hotels-the-free-breakfast-gets-bigger\/<\/em><hr\/><\/center>",<br>"json_metadata":" \"community\":\"steempress\",<br>\"app\":\"steempress\/1.1\",<br>\"tags\":[\"blockchain\",<br>\"cryptocurrency\",<br>\"crypto\" " | | comment_options | "author":"waqqasalvi",
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