This is a guest post by Jim Harper and the opinions reflected are those of the author.
If triumphalism drove adoption, Bitcoin use would already be widespread, and its price against other currencies would be stratospheric. But the existence of a genius protocol does not guarantee its success. For Bitcoin to thrive, there must be a great deal of social and economic change. To foster such change, the Bitcoin ecosystem needs better and more mature communications. It’s a deficit that is costing the Bitcoin ecosystem in lost potential each day it persists.
Bitcoin and the blockchain are brilliant and fascinating technologies. But Bitcoin’s social capital needs are manifold. To deliver on its promises of global financial inclusion, user-defined privacy, enhanced liberty and a stable money supply for all the world’s people, the Bitcoin ecosystem needs a larger and more sophisticated community of software and protocol developers, greater assurance against mining centralization, and a thriving community of node operators. The embrace of the financial services community would speed adoption. Bitcoin needs the reality and perception of low volatility; it needs protocols and practices that assure privacy, flourishing marketplaces, a congenial regulatory environment and a positive reputation. (This list of social capital needs is drawn from this author’s 2014 study of impediments to Bitcoin’s success .)
Efforts are going into developing Bitcoin’s social capital. The Open Bitcoin Privacy Project is doing salutary work on the privacy piece. Coin Center is demystifying Bitcoin for regulators. But the dominant theme in Bitcoin-land remains the “block size debate,” which will determine how Bitcoin adds capacity, as it must . Perhaps it helps to frame the debate as politics in a “non-political” money system and governance by competition . Whatever the case, there is an ongoing failure to communicate and persuade.
The drawn-out block size debate does not […]
