Table of Contents
What is Money?
Even though Bitcoin has been around for almost fifteen years, people still struggle to describe what it actually is. Seven years ago, I wrote a post where I listed a few basic features of money:
- It can act as a store of value.
- It can work as a medium of exchange.
- It can serve as a unit of account.
Bitcoin has worked as a store of value since day one, but it’s still missing the other two basic functions of money. To me, Bitcoin today feels more like a tech stock than a currency. It doesn’t seem strange to us that nobody prices things in Google shares or accepts them as payment, does it?
Paying With Stocks
Actually, I think a debit card linked to an index fund would be a great tool, stocks usually perform better than cash. But stocks lack the most essential property of a currency: the ability to spend them freely without asking for permission.
Most merchants still accept cash, so if a cashless payment gets blocked for any reason, you can always fall back on physical money. All fiat currencies can be converted to cash and spent anonymously and permissionlessly, at least for now.
With stocks or index funds, you can’t do anything like that. You can’t just transfer them to anyone, and you can’t be sure your broker will approve the transfer. For that reason, stocks work only as a store of value. They’re completely unusable as money.
Onchain Payments are Slow and Expensive
So what about bitcoin? It already works as a store of value, but like stocks, it’s not used as a medium of exchange or a unit of account. The main reason is simple: on-chain transactions are too slow and too expensive for everyday spending.
I once tried to buy a coffee with bitcoin and had to wait half an hour for a miner confirmation. Sure, some merchants might accept zero‑confirmation transactions, but that’s pretty reckless, no wonder there aren’t more places that accept Bitcoin today.
Lightning Network
Bitcoin has no physical form, and making instant, permissionless cash‑like payments is a very hard problem to solve. In fact, it took Bitcoin developers about fifteen years to build a usable system that lets merchants receive bitcoin instantly with very low fees.
That system is the Lightning Network, and it’s being actively deployed around the world right now.
Introducing BTC Map
BTC Map is a project I’ve been working on since May, and now we’re a small team improving our software and data. Everything we build: data, apps, and infrastructure, is open source.
Our goal is to make spending bitcoin as easy as spending cash. Turning Bitcoin into a real medium of exchange is still one of the biggest unsolved problems, and I hope we can make a dent in it.