For many in the world, their life consists of making money to eat, obtain shelter, provide for your family. Scrapping by at the bottom of the barrel in order to just get by. Their purpose in life consists primarily of seeking these basics.

Fortunately for us in the first world, this is rarely a concern and creates the opportunity for greater growth in individuals to motivate them to achieve goals beyond materialism. Many people have written about human motivations, one of my personal favorites was “Motivation and Personality” by Abraham Maslow.

This diagram is from this book and shows the following hierarchy of needs to achieve self-actualization. That is determining what a person’s full potential and the realization of that potential.

This doesn’t just apply to individuals but also groups of people. Whether a non-profit organization, a company, or a group of hobbyists. The group needs a purpose beyond growing for the sake of growing. Particularly once you have grow past the point of self-sufficiency.

The self-sufficient inflection point for me in understanding the purpose of Bitcoin was once Bitcoin hit $10,000 and then shortly after that $20,000. Hearing people discuss Bitcoin in the winter of 2017 was interesting because the only purpose of Bitcoin to them was one of ever-increasing investment.

“Bitcoin will hit $100,000 next year!” “Bitcoin is worth way more than it is now”, “There are only 21 million! You need at least one whole Bitcoin to make it!”, etc etc.

Is the purpose of Bitcoin supposed to be a limited commodity that other individuals will want because it is rare and others have it? Is the purpose to be “digital gold” that is “heavy” and rarely transfers because it costs so much? What is the purpose of Bitcoin beyond making the existing Bitcoin holders richer?

Many have pointed out that the title of the white paper by Satoshi said “A peer-to-peer electronic cash system” however, I think there are more telling passages as to the purpose of the Bitcoin within the white paper:

1. “A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.”

2. “The network itself requires minimal structure.”

3. “Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments.”

4. “The only way to confirm the absence of a transaction is to be aware of all transactions.”

5. “To accomplish this without a trusted party, transactions must be publicly announced, and we need a system for participants to agree on a single history of the order in which they were received. The payee needs proof that at the time of each transaction, the majority of nodes agreed it was the first received.”

When I read this, it is clear to me that the purpose of Bitcoin was supposed to be electronic cash that could be sent directly without a trusted party in the middle. It seems that no one who is excited about Bitcoin these days is because of that purpose. What is the purpose of Bitcoin now? People have been buying it because it is going up in the hope that it will go up even more. It has become an asset of speculative value similar to collectibles. That doesn’t mean that Bitcoin is dying, it just means that it has lost its motivation and purpose to pursue anything other than being there. Bitcoin has fallen down the hierarchy to the most basic level of needs pyramid, just struggling to get by and exist for another day.

Please click ‘like’ and tell me in a comment if you want more content like this. You can also go into my profile and click “follow”. I want to do an article on the core values and culture of Bitcoin versus Bitcoin cash and if you click ‘like’ that will motivate me to write more content. I also want to write an article on BTC versus BCH as a battle for the spirit of this technology.

Do you have a sense of purpose?