As we close out a tempestuous 2015 in the “real world” of increasing political and economic discord, it has largely escaped notice outside of a few small, highly technical circles that 2015 was indeed a tremendous year for bitcoin , its underlying blockchain technologies and numerous new initiatives to expand upon this already highly disruptive set of technologies we can group together as digital assets . The world of digital assets
First, a word about digital assets. The term has been floating around the digital currency space for quite some time, but it seemed to pick up steam as the superior phrase during the recent Money 20/20 conference in Las Vegas (a payments confab where bankers outnumbered bitcoiners at least ten to one), as it’s frankly a better phrase than cryptocurrency to describe the group of technologically created elements as (a) they don’t all act like currency – in fact, the point of the “private blockchain” is to use the underlying technology as software with no economic incentives to establish consensus, which is a hallmark of bitcoinCT r: 7 , the original blockchain, and (b) it helps to clarify the narrative that what all of these things have in common is that they are indeed assets and not just files – they cannot be duplicated, yet they retain most of their other digital properties, allowing for global dissemination and secure storage.
Let’s start with why this was a banner year for bitcoin. First, the price. It would appear that the two-year bear market in Bitcoin as a tradeable commodity has passed (like the stock market, oil futures, pork bellies and anything else that has value and trades globally, these cycles will continue, of course). The early January low price on Bitstamp (the most quoted exchange) was $151, yet by late […]
