Bitcoin made big news over the past year or so, when the price spiked and made some people rich. The possibility of fast money always generates a lot of commotion, and it certainly did this time.
Personally, I didn’t want the price of Bitcoin to spike; it grabbed people’s attention for all the wrong reasons. Cryptocurrencies—of which Bitcoin is the first, the best known, and currently the most important—are a revolution in commerce. But they are also much more than that.
Bitcoin is an intrusion into a stasis-oriented world: the child of radical concepts and cryptography, birthed by confirmed outsiders. This is a new and different thing, not a slightly different financial tool.
But even this is not what matters most about Bitcoin.
Enter the Bitcoin Kids
The Bitcoin blockchain—a decentralized public ledger for the transfer of assets—is truly a ground-breaking development, but that’s not the key factor here.
The ability to utterly bypass the Fed, SWIFT, and the rest of the money monopoly is the answer to a hard-money advocate’s fondest dreams, yet even this isn’t the thing that really matters.
What matters are the people whom I call, affectionately, “the Bitcoin kids.†This is a very loose grouping of thousands of people, mostly fairly young and widely dispersed, who are thoroughly committed to the cryptocurrency revolution and all that it entails.
What the uninitiated don’t understand is that these people are not just trading bitcoins; they are busy developing a whole new generation of products and services—things like Silent Vault, Monetas, Etherium, and many others. Lots of them are involved in 3D printing, and some, in the maker movement. Others are involved in humanitarian efforts like BitcoinNotBombs.
These young people are not terrified at the prospect of failing at a new venture. Rather, they are picking spots, jumping in, and getting to work. And if a venture of theirs does fail, they pick themselves up and start over.
