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The fact that your comment is correct and wrong at the same time is what really raises red flags for me with regards to bitcoin. Let's look at what you find if you were somebody searching up bitcoin for the first time. You would eventually land on http://bitcoin.org/en/. bitcoing.org describes bitcoin as open source P2P Money. It says "Bitcoin is an innovative payment network and a new kind of money". You go on Wikipedia and you get "Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer payment network and digital currency based on an open source[6] protocol, which makes use of a public transaction log". The creators and early adopters of Bitcoin clearly wanted it to be used as a currency and as money, but it is being done in an unconventional way, to say the least. Unfortunately, none of us seem to understand this so everyone thinks that if it is supposed to be money at its root, it should behave like money does. Bitcoin is such new and uncharted territory that most of us do not know what to expect. We are all wondering how these virtual coins are able to stand and hold value on the mere fact that people are exchanging them among one another for nothing other than speculating that they will benefit from the exchange in a future exchange (their really is no benefit you feel right away, such as their would be if you bought something with cash, as many places do not accept bitcoin). But at the same time, I feel that when money in the form of paper bills was first introduced, there had bound to be people wondering the same thing. After all, taking a step back, who would consider putting such value to pieces of paper that we do in today's day and age? At the end of the day, I see what Bitcoin is trying to be and would be real happy to see it get there, but I also see what people think it is, a glorified internet point, their ticket to wealth. |
The thing with paper money, at least recently, was that it originally started out as being tied to gold. Instead of having to carry around gold for exchange, you would exchange these pieces of papers which were the equivalent amount in gold. However, once the idea of paper money became so entrenched governments realised they could remove the actual backing without many people saying "Hey wait a minute. These pieces of paper are now worthless."
If people had tried to introduce paper money originally without the gold backing, there's no way it would have caught on in the same way.