Bitcoin investors represent the ultimate contrarians. While the list of VC’s on Sand Hill Rd invested in Bitcoin is growing, the industry is far from agreement. So it is surprising to see patterns of herd mentality.

Without a doubt, the focus on investors’ minds is on the exchange and wallet level. It makes sense — very few Bitcoin ideas work at scale without fluid transfers with the traditional financial system. However, the market is completely overweight on infrastructure.

Let’s think back to the early internet days. There were more investment dollars flowing to the infrastructure: the network, servers, fiber optics, and browsers. When Bezos pitched his concept for an online book retailer, investors feared “BarnesAndNobles.com” and “Borders.com.” It seems silly in hindsight, but the consensus investor favored infrastructure and missed the Amazon vision. The contrarian investors including John Doerr were rewarded handsomely.

That brings me to a more focused analogy — online wallets. Somewhere in the early 2000's, PayPal established itself as the dominant online wallet. There are many competitors lately (Venmo, Dwolla, Square), but there were many competitors in the early days too. Citibank invested heavily in C2it and attempted to buy PayPal on multiple occasions. CertaPay tried to push internationally in Canada, Europe, and Asia.

PayPal prevailed then because they had a partnership with eBay. All the other online wallets had P2P functionality, but PayPal was differentiated because it had a use case — shop in addition to splitting a meal with a friend.

P2P payment is less novel now than it was a decade ago. Every Bitcoin wallet does P2P by default. You can differentiate based on security among other capabilities, but what difference does it make to the end user?

PurseIO is eBay and PayPal. We offer a fast wallet, but more importantly, we deliver an application where you can immediately use Bitcoin.