Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective
This is my favourite article about Bitcoin to date, and properly describes one of the main ideas I wish Bitcoin detractors would come around to. Bitcoin has a lot of problems as a unit of account and as a store of value, but <i>that is not primarily what Satoshi was building</i> (<a href="https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf</a>). Bitcoin is, and has always been, a medium of exchange first and foremost. It still has <i>some</i> shortcomings in that regard, but it is the closest thing we have to solving the trust issues of peer-to-peer exchange in a purely technical fashion.<p>Comparing Bitcoin addresses to the IP layer of the internet is brilliant. Something that the Bitcoin community has been a bit slow to accept is the idea that "peer-to-peer exchange" may be occurring at the <i>corporate</i> level rather than at the individual level for most people--it's hard to imagine a world where that isn't true due to the points outlined in the "Comparison to the card networks" part of this article. <i>However</i> as long as the corporate implementation is done in such a way that anyone <i>could</i> jump in as an individual if they wanted to bear their own risk, then we are still miles ahead of how the traditional financial system currently works ("net neutrality" for money).