It’s not.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve never felt so compelled to drink in my life than the past week watching Bitcoin. It’s like watching a paper airplane bounce in the wind that could either nosedive any moment or catch another swift gust upward.
I get it. It looks like a really volatile stock ripe for quick profit or financial demise at the roll of some dice, and if we keep treating it this way, that’s exactly how it will remain.
Investing in stock drives the production of better goods and services, but currency isn’t a commodity which will depreciate due to the nature of its own decay. It’s not a service which could lose its public appeal in a few years. Intellectual property is a closer metaphor, but a dollar will still never hold intrinsic value, ironically, unless it is one day viewed as an antique.
The true beauty of currency is that it doesn’t exist corporeally nor have any intrinsic value at all.
Cryptocurrency, by its very nature, cannot accurately represent value if it is perceived as being valuable itself, and as soon as we stop treating it as a means to redistribute wealth in another currency, it can get back to doing its real job — facilitating fair and reliably accountable exchange. If that’s not your endgame for participating in it, then you should get out of it entirely because you’re defeating the purpose.
What we’re witnessing in arguably the grandest display in recent history is dissatisfaction with the status quo, and each dollar exchanged is an act of rebellion, a protest, and middle finger to every bank who is “too big to fail.” As the price of bitcoin grows, so does a collective wager that the people can manage our own transactions more reliably than isolated centralized systems with national borders. Its volatile gesticulation is a global negotiation and argument how best to handle our transactions. Putting money into any cryptocurrency isn’t an investment. It’s a vote.
Source/More: Stop Treating Bitcoin Like Stock – Hacker Noon
