The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin

This is a fairly old article at this point but I think it's cool that Ashish posted it. Despite being a bumpy ride, I think Bitcoin confirmed some pretty crazy hypotheses and set the stage for some pretty incredible things.

I would love to see the Bitcoin model paired with some of the ideas Muhammad Yunus has been espousing recently. His point that creating a sustainable social enterprise requires creating wealth within communities makes perfect sense to me, but as long as that wealth-creation relies on direct peer-to-peer lending, the potential for usurious lending will exist. I would love to see a company administer micro-finance algorithmically and then distribute equity in the company through a cryptological model similar to Bitcoin.

The standard lifecycle of a company typically involves raising large financing rounds prior to major expansions. Uncertainty about dilution adds additional risk to equity investing and an infinitely expanding system may be able to solve this problem. Naturally, this would do nothing to solve the problems inherent to relative valuation, and just like Bitcoin, such a company would likely see very choppy pricing. Nevertheless, it would be nice to cure some of the problems caused by inflation / dilution.