I have spent a fair amount of time over the past few months reading about Bitcoin. Living in San Francisco has definitely opened my eyes up to this new technology, especially because it is a city where everyone has an opinion on Bitcoin . More importantly is the fact that most of those opinions are informed, as opposed to the constant barrage of speculation and fear mongering that seems to consume the media's attention. Like so many subjects today the people who are making the most dire predictions about Bitcoin and while it will fail are often in no position to make those judgements at all.
It has also been comforting to know that even some of Bitcoin's most ardent supporters have not fully grasped the technology, and are not shy about admitting as much. Below is a quick summary of some of the benefits of the technology from Stripe's blog followed by a few of the most worthwhile articles I have found on the subject.
Less than 12 months ago it would be fair to say that I did not have an opinion on Bitcoin, and even if I did it would have been a slightly negative one. Over the course of the past year however, I have become much more bullish on the technology and am beginning to see why it has some of the smartest people in the world excited and some of the wealthiest people in the world putting their money where the mouth is, investing hundreds of millions of dollars into Bitcoin related companies.
"There would be three major improvements to the existing financial system.
First, the resulting ecosystem is technologically open. Open ecosystems have a way of getting better much faster than their closed counterpart. Anyone can enter, connect to the network, and start building good tools and applications on top of it. The emerging regulatory landscape may change some of the constants, but this fundamental advantage will remain.
Second, this model unbundles the existing financial system into layers run by independent companies. To see the value of this, contrast with the US mobile carriers, who used to own the entire stack. They owned the handsets, the operating systems, the applications running on the phone, and the service. This meant that most of the stack never had anything pushing it to get very good, and there were even incentives to hold it back in order to preserve legacy revenue-generating facilities like SMS. By enabling competition at individual layers of the financial system, each one should improve.
And third, this would be the first truly global payments network: anyone would be empowered to start a gateway in their country, rather than relying on it eventually making sense for some centralized actor. This is especially powerful for people in countries with underdeveloped banking systems, which many traditional payment systems never reach."