Make Bitcoin great(usable) again
There are two types of developers —
- Developers who believe Bitcoin will become money
- Developers who do not believe Bitcoin will ever become money
To the former, I say:
The world is not going to read about the disadvantages of paper money and understand the debate between Keynes vs Hayek unless it’s in the form of a rap battle. The world is not going to understand how miners performing hashing functions to secure transactions. They are not going to learn about public key cryptography to understand why they should keep their private keys safe. They are not going to learn to calculate the risk of a double spend and they are not going to run a full node either to propagate their transactions quickly. The reason is that they don’t care. And rightfully so. They shouldn’t care either.
Bitcoin should just work, seamlessly without them even understanding that they are using some other form of money. People don’t care how money gets printed but they know that the value of a hundred dollar bill comes in what they can buy with that 100 dollars. So next time, you want to convince your clients/friends that they should start accepting Bitcoin, don’t start with the story of how barter began, just send them a link to our API. They’ll get it, trust me!
To latter, I say:
All those days of reading chargeback API docs but still losing money to fraudsters, those days are done. All those days of looking at your payment processor’s bills and seeing 5% of your income vanish. Done. Gone. History. That world was the past and the world of tomorrow doesn’t have time for such petty difficulties.
Maybe you never understood why your bank charges 5% for accepting payments. Payments were just data and you were using AWS to process TBs of data. Well, you were right! Payments are just data and now they are just a few lines of HTML. Payments are just a monthly API service that you pay a subscription fees to. You don’t need to visit the bank and fill pages of paperwork and sign away the permission to steal a percentage of funds just to help you accept payments. All you need to do is setup a Bitcoin wallet and you can now test out that business idea you always had and reach out to customers all over the world. Who cares if you are accepting something that is not money? Think of it as API token credits that you can redeem later.
Build the future
To both types of developers I say, imagine a future where you can now start sending and receiving money programatically. What does that enable you to do? How does that change your business? JoyStream is trying to rethink Torrents by paying peer clients for streaming. Yours is rethinking publishing. Creators no longer need to give away 10% of their earnings to payment processors but can use their incomes to create even better content. There’s a new future to build for and that’s why Bitcoin is exciting. The question is- What are you building?
