Bitcoin hasn’t disrupted shit
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The past two years have taken a toll on the Bitcoin community.
- 2013: Community coalesced and fixed a fork within 6 hours
- 2015: /r/bitcoin bashing Bitcoin’s biggest contributors for the past 6 month over Block size
During Purse’s post demo-day networking party (2014), a non-bitcoiner mentioned this:
It’s cliche with Silicon Valley startups talking about “changing the world,” but when the Bitcoin guys went on stage, it felt like they really believed it.
Declining prices and scalability concerns drains morale, but here’s the real problem:
- Bitcoin remittance still uses wire transfer on the backend
- Most bitcoin companies still depend banking relationships
- Jamie Dimon still says Bitcoin will fail
- Parts of the industry started divorcing blockchain from Bitcoin
- Drug cartels couldn’t care less about darknet markets (speculation)
Our space is saturated with [insert-existing-service] for Bitcoin. We (the Bitcoin community, the companies, the currency itself) haven’t disrupted anything, yet.
But here’s why you shouldn’t feel any different about Bitcoin than when that lightbulb first lit. Bitcoin can do things that fiat physically cannot do (e.g. trustless escrow), but products leveraging them are scarce. As a result, most Bitcoiners haven’t used them.
- Does a speculative bubble really bring that much value to long term Bitcoin exchange rate?
- Does the Block size really matter if the average Joe can just use Visa/Venmo/BoA?
If mass adoption were to occur (i.e. Bitcoin is truly disruptive), we need to build new products that neither depend on old ones, nor compete with them. Disruptive products simply obviate the status quo.
Purse’s mission has always been to build products that are compelling to Joe; enough so that he’d become a “Bitcoiner.” Our vision for Tritium advances this mission on a larger scale.
- Tritium is an open and flexible smart-contract platform
- It is simple to use for both end users and developers
- It will be open-sourced
Tritium’s goal is to enable new marketplaces to emerge; markets that couldn’t exist with traditional payments.
