Stop Treating Bitcoin Like Stock

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.

Will Bitcoin win?

Who knows? It’s literally up to us. If any currency including the dollar crumbles, it’s because consumers lost faith in it, not because it couldn’t sustainably meet some demand. So if you take away one thing from me, let it be this:

Calling Bitcoin a bubble is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Got a lot of money in it and want to see it grow? Then leave it. If we could all agree on this notion, Bitcoin could be the new global reserve tomorrow, and you’d be doing your shopping not with all the money you’ve made from Bitcoin, but with Bitcoin. Instead of questioning how much of our dollars to exchange, we’d be scrambling to get the rest of it in there. This is the one question you should ask yourself when exchanging fiat value for cryptocurrency: Is this how I’d rather spend my money? If Bitcoin is not your answer to that, don’t buy it.

Bitcoin isn’t the first of its kind, and it’s demonstrably not the last; it’s just the most successful right now, and since popularity is really at the heart of any mass system of exchange, success, in the long run, will be what matters. So since this thing is just getting started, should we trade around? Sure, go for it. Something will inevitably come out on top or else we’ll all be stuck in some purgatorial economic limbo for a long time. This will probably occur when the public is satisfied with the fiat efficiency of managing transactions and the current distribution of wealth, but until then, put your money where your faith is. That way, we wind up with a system we actually want.

If you’re satisfied with dollars, keep your dollars. After all, you already have the advantage of participating in the fiat system. And if you’re looking to make more of them, buy stock generated by dollars, not cryptocurrency because if fiat profit is what you’re after, the mainstream financial analysts are right — it’s a terrible and risky investment to take your desired currency out of its participatory system.