The great unknown Bitcoin killer app

It’s cliched at this point to say that bitcoin now is the internet in 1995 or cell phones in 1998 or the television in 1950. Many people have made the prediction that the exponential growth of bitcoin is about to come and I happen to agree. What’s interesting about the current state of bitcoin isn’t merely that there is huge growth ahead, it’s that we have no idea what the growth is going to look like.

Take, for instance, the internet. Around 1994, the people that did anything on the internet at all were using it mostly for email. Some more savvy users maybe participated in newsgroups. A few very bleeding-edge people made web pages. You could have foreseen that there would be better versions of those things. What you couldn’t foresee was stuff like VOIP, Bittorrent, video on demand or social networks. These are all technologies built on top of the internet and currently take up a large part of the traffic that goes through it.

Email for most people in the 90′s was the first great killer app. It allowed people to communicate with each other without sending letters or making phone calls. Most people that knew about the internet in the early 90′s pointed to the post office as the first industry to get disrupted by the internet and to some degree they were right. What most people didn’t see back then was that the internet would also disrupt the music store, the video rental store and to some degree, even the book store. In the same way, for most people bitcoin is a way to send money easily, so they point to Western Union and other money transmission businesses as the ones that will get disrupted. To a large degree they’re right, but it’s not the only one that’ll get disrupted.

Think about the cell phone. It was fairly obvious that it would disrupt the corner telephone booth. But it’s also disrupted the low end camera/camcorder industry, the watch industry, the mobile gaming industry, the audio book industry, etc. Cell phones are so much more than a phone these days.

In the same way, bitcoin is much more than a convenient method to transfer money. There will be applications that nobody has thought of yet that will make bitcoin incredibly useful. Furthermore, these new applications will cause further adoption.