Money serves three purpose – unit of accounting, a medium of exchange, and a store of value. Cryptocurrencies have been compared to Programmable Money. Anything programmable requires an experimentation platform for iterations and improvement. Bitcoin seems to have won the “store of value” battle. Ethereum has the developer mindshare and is the preferred experimentation platform. Multiple cryptocurrencies are still fighting the battle to be the medium of exchange.
The amusing part is that every cryptocurrency startup envies Ethereum’s developer ecosystem and is trying to attract developers. But there isn’t any real value capture being the experimentation platform. A successful product has a high chance of leaving Ethereum and migrating users to its chain. The real battle, I believe, remains in becoming the medium of exchange, being the programmable Visa & Mastercard equivalent.
Do you know of any such projects ? It would be really awesome if we had easy replacement of visa and master card. I was thinking the same thing but never found any good starting point. In theory everybody could have one DIY card reader for transactions and every person could make their own DIY cards, or use NFC for that.
There are quite a few attempts at building cryptocurrency-based payment cards on top of Visa and Mastercard. I think a big success would be side-stepping these existing platforms. And that will probably happen in the parts of the world where they don’t exist, to begin with.