The Anchor
If Bitcoin were a piece of equipment on a sailboat, it would be the anchor. There's nothing really special or exciting about Bitcoin except that it is very dependable an unchanging. An anchor is an anchor. No matter what kind of modifications you make to it, it's still an anchor. Its purpose is to prevent the ship from getting swept away by uncertain tide.
The world is saturated by scarcity; artificial and otherwise. This makes us terrified to lose what we have. If we lived in abundance we wouldn't have to worry about such things.
They own all the boats.
They own all the land.
They own all the food, shelter and water.
They give us just enough scraps to get by as we tread water to stay afloat.
Scarcity
Blockchain is the one thing they can't fully own. This causes them to spread FUD. How many times has Bitcoin died? How many times has it been declared worthless?
I remember when Bitcoin hit $1. I was like, "hm, wow, it hit parity with USD, can't go much higher than that." When I bought Bitcoin for $600 to buy into a poker site I was also worried it was massively overvalued. Ethereum was trading for $10. I tried to wrap my head around smart-contracts but instead decided I was wasting my time and that nothing could compete with Bitcoin. Litecoin was currently also trading under $5. I let my money sit on the poker site and never even used it to play. I cashed it out during the bear run and lost most of it. Live and learn.
The hypocrites create the dip and then buy it out. They create an artificial peak and then force you at gunpoint to pay taxes on money that doesn't exist. We're taught to believe that we live in a land of Law & Order, checks and balances, but rules only exist to keep the poor in line. If you have money you can pretty much do anything you want.
The Blockchain threatens to change that. It threatens to create transparent financial systems that won't allow governments to claim they spent $50,000 on a toilet seat. It threatens to hold the elite accountable. Everyone of our heroes and champions of the light have been slain when they followed this path, but blockchain can not be killed. It is headless and pervasive across the entire globe. The military industrial complex is in decline due to rampant greed. It may not have the power to stop the approaching paradigm, but if you think they aren't going to try you're in for a not-so surprise.
This corruption-resistant economy is in it's infancy. More than anything it needs security. How can you convince a bunch of fearful peons that it's okay to board this patchwork ship and trust it with your life and livelihood? Bitcoin is the answer.
In the bull run of winter 2013/2014 Bitcoin lost a factor of 5 (80%) of its value. This time around it's only lost a factor of 3 (66%). As time goes on these losses will become even more reduced until Bitcoin becomes so stable that stable-coins pegged to USD are actually less trustworthy.
Bitcoin has brand and an amazing track record. Every year that ticks by will convince more and more of the world population that it's okay to trust this store of value above everything else. What happens next?
Mainstream adoption.
It's not going to take people very long to realize that Bitcoin is kind of boring. At first, they needed it to feel safe, but now that they already feel safe why not diversify to owning other parts of the ship? What about the sails, rudder, and cannons? What about the masts, crow's-nest, and deck? What about the governance of the ship itself? Everything on this crypto-ship is tokenized and can be partially owned.
Most of us look at crypto through the lens of scarcity, competition, and corporatocracy. This is the exact opposite of the spirit of The Blockchain. Corporations are immortal, so we expect Bitcoin to be immortal. Corporations crush the competition, so we expect Bitcoin to crush the competition. That's not actually how it works.
This space is cooperative and open-source. The anchor isn't going to evolve into sails and slowly take over the entire ship. There's room enough for everyone. That's the whole point of decentralization.
The anchor will only evolve into a better anchor. Eventually, this sea-faring ship will evolve into a space-ship, and the need for an anchor will be pointless. We'll put Bitcoin up on the mantle and point to it in a museum, telling our children to remember how it all started.
Cryptocurrencies have a life-span.
They aren't immortal corporations locked in endless warfare.
Bitcoin's destined to be the Faberge egg of the crypto world.
We all know they're valuable and really old, and it'd be fun to own one, but we wouldn't know where to put it, it wouldn't do us much good, and we'd constantly worry it'd be lost or stolen.
This is indeed a good analogy.
However, the future is not a boat, in this analogy it would be a space ship or something, that doesn't need an anchor.
Basically bitcoin is going to become the thing that nations settle debts with. Which will be great... as an anchor. However, just like nations, its days are numbered.
"Money" is very one dimensional. It supposedly measures work/effort, and stores it for future trade. But there are so many other dimensions that really need a "money".
Put that together with smart contracts, and the future looks a lot different.
Its like f-c-book and ThemTube, we are currently looking for another place to run to. But, in the future, that place will be our own servers, with a world wide, unstoppable, unblockable interconnects.
i believe this too. I may be wrong on steem, but one of its competitors is the real prize. Bitcoins literally was only made to be a proof of concept for what was meant to be the backbone for smart contracts(blockchain). People always call me crazy but you can literally look up the date that Szabo first wrote about smart contracts and it actually predates his writings on blockchain.
Bitcoin is great, but thats all it was ever meant to be was a proof of concept, just like with steemit, eventually we will all have to move on, if we want the dream to become reality
Sounds awesome!