What a comeback. The digital currency that so often has been proclaimed dead, has risen from around $163 just two years ago, to now breach the all-time high on the average price weighed index.
Bitcoin stood, across exchanges, at $1,147 in late 2013. Now, on a weighted average, it stands at $1,161, officially breaking the all-time high.
Few thought this will happen. Mired in controversy regarding transaction backlogs – a Champaign problem some say, we have too many users, how do we make space for more in a way physical resources allow – challenged too by new cool kids such as ethereum, disparaged by the more stiff upper lips who kept proclaiming blockchain, but not bitcoin – the digital currency marches, unperturbed, undeterred, proving, once more, all wrong.
It’s market now is nearing $20 billion. It finds mentions in TV sitcoms, it is accepted by Microsoft, it is patroned by that naked, unfiltered space, which keeps up the dreams of the 90s. It has the attention of PBoC. It pre-occupies, currently, the two commissioners of the SEC.
The Living Code
That is because this is not just a currency. It’s not even just a movement. Bitcoin is a network. With synapses, communication lines, a greater structure that takes all parts and forms something very new, an artificial brain with a life of its own, something we have never seen before.
Bitcoin takes all the individual, opinionated, parts and merges them, forming a holistic formidable whole. It is an organism. It lives, breaths. It thinks, metaphorically speaks.
It is served by computers in massive facilities, their power greater by far than any supercomputer. It is connected by many nodes across the world. Within it, there are debates and arguments, that’s how it grows. Outside, “cells” just decide.
No one man’s opinion controls bitcoin’s fate. However influential or prominent they might be. And if it is a group, leashing out propaganda, sockpuppets, attempting to engage in political campaigns, trying to centralize all things, why, bitcoin has no center.
It’s impossible. They only fool themselves. This currency cannot be hijacked. This currency cannot be controlled. There cannot be coups here. There cannot be proclamations or dictats. For, it is only by the will of the people bitcoin lives. Only by the wisdom of the crowd bitcoin roars or dies.
The Formidable Phoenix
I was here, though not participating, in 2011, when positive opinion sent bitcoin up to $30, to then crash due to a hack of an amateur and incompetent exchange. It stood at $2 for almost two years.
I was here too when it roared, rising at $266, to then crash again due to the above centralized and amateur MT Gox exchange. It inspired a decentralization of exchanges. There are many now, but Gox was not done.
I was here, too, when they announced their bankruptcy and misled the public in stating all, almost one million, bitcoins had been lost. That wasn’t true. I announced, with concrete evidence, they still had 200,000 bitcoins, forcing them to reveal their hidden holdings, which eventually they admitted, worth at the time and now more than $200 million.
I saw the currency in 2014 go down and down to around $160, but what a story for it to come back and now roar louder than ever.
The People’s Money
How can it not? It’s the people’s money. It’s the first free market backed currency. It has no central control, whatever some may believe in their stupid thoughts. It cares for no one’s opinion. It operates not under anyone’s permission. It’s a living, breathing, thing, with a life of its own.
Bitcoin operates solely under what is obvious and self-evident. Its complicated mechanism ensures objectivity. Its security based on the fundamental assumption that 51% of people are honest. An assumption we must take for granted for otherwise how could we have ever advanced to become what we have.
Yet, some try, but whether individuals, groups, cliques, governments or multinationals, they can say or do what they please, bitcoin cares not. Many may attempt to censor or ban, try to impose their ideology or opinion, try to force matters, propagandize, even smear, but bitcoin shrugs it off, like dust on a coat.
It roars, instead, above it all, for it is the people’s voice. The people who are taking back their rights and imposing what is obviously good – the true value of market prices, free from any manipulation, guaranteed by code, governed by us all.
It is a right, long denied, but now some genius has forced and gifted us. No one, no group, can do anything about it. Not governments, not popes, not charlatans, not so called experts, no one at all.
Roar, bitcoin, roar.
Image from Shutterstock.
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