Its actually both. Kinda like gold/silver.
Yes, right now its being seen primarily as a speculative investment, but the infrastructure is being built in order to sustain it as a currency.
What it comes down to in reality is if critical mass embrace it as a currency ... this is the hardest thing to pull off and its still very much in its infancy from that perspective.
It functions as a currency regardless, but in order to maintain value, majority people have to want to use it.
Only then will it begin to transform monetary systems on a global scale.
Bitcoins purpose is to truely revolutionize money for the first time in human history.
Yep. Humans have never ever revolutionized money before.
Hell, I still barter with clamshells.
ok, for the first time in a few centuries...
And bitcoin isn't revolutionizing anything.
And bitcoin has already failed at what it was supposedly supposed to accomplish.
A handful of organizations control all the hash power of the network already, and big companies (eg, google) and govt agencies aren't even involved yet.
Could you imagine if the real players of the world got involved? Eg, if intel + google partnered up. Intel made ASIC chips for google to run. Nobody else's hardware would be relevant anymore.
This is true..There are many sides to this story.
1) Having a few people control the majority of a cryptocoin is essential to a coins survival, that's also how it operates in the real world, horrible yes, but the only method we have in Capitalism to allow our economy to function decently.
2) Having a equal way for everyone to earn a set amount of coins, without a few people being in control of the majority of Coins, this way doesn't seem as crazy as the 1st, but it could lead to destabalization of the crypto, this way could be given a try though, would be very interesting to see how it plays out.
Having an equal way for people to earn coins is indeed crazy.
It's either one of the 2 following situations:
1) Cost to mine coins > value. This is a bit tricky. If total cost > value, but marginal cost (electricity) < value, people who already own hardware will continue to mine, but no new investment will occur. If marginal cost > value, then the network will die because only stupid people will continue to mine.
2) Total cost to mine coins < value. People/institutions will make ASIC farms to mine and cash in on the profit potential.
So unless you manage to control the value so that it's always in a state where total cost > value && marginal cost < value (even then, there's plenty of institutions that have idle hardware they could put to use), it'll either die or people will buy tons of specialized hardware to control a big part of the network.
