Food For Thought - Bitcoin's Ironic Endgame

With 2017 almost over, now is the time to reflect on how far we as a community have come this year. Bitcoin started below the thousand dollar mark earlier this year; recently this month it's been flirting with 20,000. With this, cryptocurrency has pushed itself into the mainstream almost haphazardly, stumbling into the public view as an asset, even an investment, instead of the digital currency it was designed to be.

This phenomena is shown by its volatility and caused by things like extremely large transaction fees, apparent centralization by mining, and relative difficulty of use. By adoption of other platforms (Litecoin, Vertcoin, Ark, Ethereum, etc.) some of these issues will start to fade away.

Therein lies a great irony of the world's first digital currency; Instead of conducting transactions via bitcoin day-to-day, it has become a way to accrue more - you guessed it - fiat.

Yes, the irony is palpable. But bitcoin birthed a great technology with a huge amount of use-cases along with a vibrant development community. Personally, I've enjoyed watching the community grow, and will continue to watch anxiously throughout the next coming years.