ML-Implode News - Bitcoin Will Never Be a Currency--It's Something Way Weirder

Precious metal-style speculation is why bitcoin's value is on the rise: The price is going up because people think the price will keep going up--particularly people in China, which now dominates the bitcoin landscape... [But] Thanks to Ethereum and other alternatives to the bitcoin network, such tokens are increasingly prevalent online, and they're intended to function as digital versions of anything that holds value--not just money. Ethereum, for example, runs "smart contracts"--software programs that can potentially drive entire businesses.
"For the first time, we're seeing software automate business itself--the business entity," says Carlson-Wee, who bought his first bitcoin in 2011, when it was $2 a coin, and penned his undergraduate thesis on the technology that same year. With Polychain, he is betting on this new kind of business--and only this new kind of business.
... ultimately, decentralized operations like Golum or the DAO will be the norm. One day, he says, the world will use a decentralized Facebook, not Facebook itself, a decentralized Uber, a decentralized Etsy, and on and on into every sector of the economy. "We're going to see whole industries plowed over by software contracts living in these blockchains," he says. Carlson-Wee is not the first person to propose such a future, and he acknowledges that if it arrives at all, it's still a long way off. But his fund is betting that it will.

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Bitcoin Will Never Be a Currency--It's Something Way Weirder