To appreciate why Bitcoin is such a great innovation, you have to understand a great number of different variables, including economics, politics, history, and technology. Although I have a decent background in all of these areas, it took me a long time to appreciate the full genius of Satoshi and potential of Bitcoin. What follows is my own story from skeptic to believer.
My initial appraisal of Bitoin was that it was a fascinating technical innovatoin that would forever be accessible only to a very small segment of the population that salivates over cryptography.
Ironically, it was in the process of creating a startup that in many ways was the polar opposite of Bitcoin that I started to appreciate the core innovations of Bitcoin. My own platform, Evergreen, contained it's own blockchain optimized for high velocity micropayments, with a unit of account weighted to a basket of currencies and commodities. In many senses, it was a reflection of an international monetary system as I would have designed it, fast, reliable, seamless, and trustworthy. It also contained a plan to programmatically disperse some part of the asset backing into conservation efforts.
What seemed like a great idea at the time ran aground on the reality of institutions. Big banks seem to have little interest in innovating unless it includes new techniques for money laundering. International institutions have massive amounts of lag times and various competing interests. Everyone is very busy and looking for quick fixes and expeditious ways to make money, not designing beautiful solutions to complex problems.
Even worse, there is a mountain of regulation around all of these solutions. In a heart felt conversation with eGold founder Doug Jackson, I heard a striking story of an attempt to innovate, including the bitter end to which it brought him. Governments often have their own interests, and when there is no difference between governmental regulators and big banks dedicated to defrauding the people, the people always lose.
Upon reflection, it seems an invariable fact that those most interested in money are those least worth of trust to hold it. Both monarchs and merchants have at varying times decided that their debts are not to be honored. The monarchs may be deposed, while the merchants simply migrate to new lands.
Somehow, in an supposed age of democracy, we have simply ended up electing kings. Kings that start wars around the globe to consolidate power. Kings that spy on their own populace to make sure they don't have the wrong opinions. Kings that bend the rules of their own countries to take on more executive power than their constitution allows. In our new type of government, merchants have become monarchs.
It was actually not until approximately six months ago that the lightbulb finally went on in my head. I had long been a fan of Vitalik Buterin's precise explanatory essays on various aspects of the Blockchain. The Ethereum whitepaper, as it emerged, seemed an toolkit for programmable money. Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, even Decentralized Autonomous Societies seemed just around the corner.
I enthusiastically promoted Ethereum for a couple months. It was in these second generation technologies that I saw revolutionary potential, a potential to return the power to where it belonged, in the people's hands. I also attempted to built connections between activists and tech wizards, explaining things and attempting to push things to a wider mass audience.
As I read deeper, I saw that there were many prophets of this particular moment, who saw more clearly than I the massive potential of decentralized networks applied to money, the new types of innovations that "programmable capitalism" could allow. Among this included the "for us by us" power of a bunch of software knowledgeable people building solutions for each other without the interference of traditional investors. Among other things, it involves a greater velocity of money due to a lower friction and a panoply of novel solutions.
Bitcoin, as I see it, is a massive distributed network for which the value will grow as people build things on top of it. I am particularly enthusiastic about decentralized exchanges (Counterparty), multisig (CryptoCorp, BitGo) and interesting things like hardware wallets and ATMS.
That said, what I am most excited about is my own project, SWARM. SWARM was designed around the idea of swarm intelligence, the emergent potential of decentralized networks to create projects and finance them. It was designed to solve the problem of accountability that has often existed in coin related projects and bring the power of the blockchain to a wider audience.
I believe that it is projects like SWARM with clear use cases and awesome usability that have the greatest potential to bring Bitcoin out of a niche audience and to the general public. We are offering our own coin SWARM in a fundraiser that has a novel usage.