Many in the Bitcoin community have expressed that the most compelling function they want the Bitcoin Foundation to focus its advocacy programs on in the next 12 months is; serving as a medium of exchange. According to the outcomes of a community survey released by the Foundation, 37% of the respondents choose to focus on Bitcoin as a medium of exchange – i.e. used to actually buy things – over its use as a store of value (18%), 10% who do not know and 36% that opted for other uses. Commenting on the survey, the Executive Director of The Bitcoin Foundation, Llew Claasen , told Cointelegraph: “The Foundation needs to re-establish legitimacy amongst long-time Bitcoin community members because of things that may or may not have happened in the past through predecessors.“ Uses of Bitcoin When used as a medium of exchange, rather than as an investment vehicle, Bitcoin shows users many potential benefits as it cannot be created at will and its supply is finite, write Timothy R. McTaggart and Matthew R. Silver of Pepper Hamilton LLP. However, Harvard University’s Stephanie Lo and J. Christina Wang of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston in Bitcoin as Money? , noted that Bitcoin must be accepted as payment for a sufficiently large set of goods or services, or other assets to serve as a medium of exchange. Their paper says: “A user is willing to accept a fiat money as payment for other objects of value only if she is confident that enough others will be willing to accept it in turn from her. Unlike the regular fiat money, however, Bitcoin is not backed by any sovereign entity that can compel the acceptance of its affiliated fiat money within a certain realm. Therefore, in order to serve as a medium […]
