To score Bitcoin points like Digital Airline Miles – Bitcoin Magazine
This is an opinion editor of Michael Rheethe founder of Wavlake and a contributor to Bitcoin Magazine.
Everyone loves to keep points. From likes and reviews on social media to airline smiles and Starbucks Rewards, points tell us exactly where we stand in the commercial world. On social media platforms, they can mean more eyes and a sense of validation. In a world of airlines and coffee shops, they can mean more free rides and frappuccinos.
Today, each of these scores lives in a fenced garden. As a gift card to your favorite store, these points can only be redeemed in one place and are locked within a limited context. I can not convert likes on my tweets to free coffee. Nor can I turn the views on my YouTube videos into discounted hotel stays.
But it does not have to be this way.
Imagine a point system on the internet that everyone used, and that could freely cross a variety of platforms and applications, and provide a unified definition of value across them all.
If visions of the coming metaverse are true, this kind of interoperability will be the fabric that weaves it all together. I believe that bitcoin has a key role to play in building a more unified commercial world – both on and off the internet – that serves as a simple, shared value measure that can move across real and virtual boundaries without friction.
As the founder of Wavlake, I try to build this world. Wavlake is a way for music listeners to support the artists they love directly by using bitcoin micropayments. It is part of a larger ecosystem of Internet services running on an open, interoperable standard for bitcoin payments. We are already witnessing the early stages of this dramatic change. At Stacker News, users reward each other for posts and comments they like by using small amounts of bitcoin. Comments can then pull that bitcoin from the page and use it to tip musicians on Wavlake. The same musicians can use their assigned bitcoin to stream podcasts on pay-per-minute players such as Breez or Fountain. Podcasters can then take the same bitcoin and convert it to US dollars using the Cash App, or turn it into a gift card with Bitrefill.
Creating the same unified dollar experience will require careful coordination and collaboration between all closed payment networks in the world. This means that Venmo must work with Zelle and vice versa, along with all other dollar-based payment apps that exist. In contrast, Bitcoin’s open standards and unauthorized nature make it unique that any service can be seamlessly integrated with any other Bitcoin service imaginable, without planning or mandate.
These united commercial worlds are still small and experimental, but have great potential for our society and economy. As bitcoin adoption continues to grow, we will gradually close the loop and create a truly global, commercial system. Naysayers will finally be able to buy – or get a free – cup of coffee using bitcoin, thus throwing away the notion that it is a useless and junk technology. This is the point where Bitcoin disappears into the background and becomes invisible, like the electricity that drives your desktop lamp.
This possible future situation makes me wonder: Maybe not everyone needs to understand the Austrian economy or triple accounting or the Byzantine general problem or how central bank services work or the WTF happened in 1971 – or some of the other, myriad frameworks to explain this complex system we calls economics. Maybe most people do not need any of this to “get” Bitcoin, in the same way I do not need to know how to build each component of a phone to understand the value.
At some point in the future, bitcoin will become the benchmark for our world. It will be just like the airline miles, but for everything.
This is a guest post by Michael Rhee. Expressed opinions are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of BTC Inc. or Bitcoin Magazine.
