Had you ever heard of Bitcoin before seeing the title to this article? What do you know about it? That it’s a way to buy illegal drugs? That the CEO died? That it’s gone bankrupt? There are grains of truth in each of these statements. Those of us with going concerns that aren’t engaged in crime or falling into ruin have to cope with the perceptions those grains create.
Released in 2009, Bitcoin is still very new, as far as network-centric applications go. The blockchain and the peer to peer connections used can be compared to other network applications like DNS, the domain name system, which was released in 1984, and which is still being refined and extended today. Immaturity in blockchain based currencies like Bitcoin is clear; the seven transactions per second and half hour verification times are issues that will have to be addressed as volume increases.
There have been spectacular, tragic failures in these first years as Bitcoin has spread, and these events, coupled with sometimes hasty journalism, have led to beliefs that are only loosely connected to reality.
Autumn Radke, CEO of First Meta, died at age twenty eight after she jumped from the balcony of her 25th story apartment in Singapore. Echoing the manner of death of stock brokers and bank executives during the crash of 1929, reporters unfamiliar with the industry cut the name First Meta out of the narrative and dramatized Radke’s tragic death the loss of “the Bitcoin CEO” .
Mt. Gox was a site associated with Magic: The Gathering, a trading card game, where players traded cards in a manner similar to stocks. Like Ebay, which started as a site about the Ebola virus , Mt. Gox stumbled into a burgeoning need for Bitcoin related services. When the company collapsed in February of 2014, […]
