“Bitcoin is a bubble.”

“It will burst.”

“Is bitcoin a bubble?”

“When will it crash?”

“Do we buy?”

“Do we sell?”

These questions and statements are the most recurring things I hear today between skeptics, investors, and speculators. It can be tempting to give a straight up yes or no answer, but to begin to entertain these questions and statements, we must first define what an economic bubble is.

According to the great Wikipedia:

“An economic bubble or asset bubble (sometimes also referred to as a speculative bubble, a market bubble, a price bubble, a financial bubble, a speculative mania, or a balloon) is trade in an asset at a price or price range that strongly exceeds the asset’s intrinsic value.”

Put simply, what defines a bubble is the price of the asset vs. its intrinsic value. If the price exceeds the intrinsic value, it is overvalued, and if it overwhelmingly exceeds it, then it’s considered a bubble.

If, on the other hand, the intrinsic value exceeds the price, then the asset is considered undervalued. And if the intrinsic value overwhelmingly exceeds the price, then it’s your investment opportunity of a lifetime.

Given the above, stating whether bitcoin — and the cryptocurrency space as a whole — is an investment opportunity of a lifetime, undervalued, overvalued, or the biggest bubble of all time, is highly subjective to the person asking this question, and the time horizon they have in mind.

For example, a person looking at the short term will see the intrinsic value consisting of nothing but hype revolving around the BTC and ETH tickers, and the price increases both of these tokens are experiencing. To those people, the cryptocurrency space is a major bubble. If the momentum continues, and new money keeps flowing in, prices will continue to go up.

If all current speculators and investors take the above approach, then what we’re experiencing is a bubble. It can burst. It may burst. It probably will burst.

But it will rebound.

Luckily for us, there are true believers in cryptocurrencies, who are looking at the long term possibilities they hold. To those, the intrinsic value of the technology is what matters, not the ticker price. To those people, the price fluctuations, the Jamie Dimon humor, and the narrow minds that cannot comprehend real change, are just noise.

So in this article, I will focus on the intrinsic value that is the blockchain technology.

I will not get into the technical. Instead, I will take you through a series of scenarios that could realistically occur in the future as a result of the growth and advancement of the assets we are consumed in speculating today. The applications discussed in these scenarios will be built on the technology and networks that form these assets or cryptocurrencies.

Value 2.0

Today, we pay someone using money, and only money. If you’re in Kuwait, you pay with KWD, if you’re in the US, you pay with USD, and in Thailand, you transact using the Thai Baht. Tomorrow, we will be able to transact in all forms of value — be it a national currency, a share in a piece of artwork we hold, or in Netflix shares.

When all forms of assets are on the blockchain, interconnected with countless lightning network equivalents, the sender will be able to pay in whatever form of value he or she sees fit. Similarly, the receiver will receive in whatever form he or she sees fit.

What does this mean?

If a street vendor in Los Angeles is selling tacos for $1C (DollarCoin that is, the crypto equivalent of the USD), I can pay him the equivalent of that in Alibaba shares, Litecoins, or whatever I hold in my wallet at that point in time, instantly exchanged to the preferred value for the receiver. At the end of the day, we will send and receive in what WE SEE OF VALUE, and not what is forced upon us as a medium of value. That in itself is phenomenal. It changes the definition of money, the definition of value, and the means to which any asset is given its real value becomes much more efficient, and true.

To better understand this example up, let’s look back at what the internet did to communication. Before the internet, all forms of communication were broadcasted through three mediums: radio, TV, and newspapers. These mediums acted as third party gateways for all our communication — we were at their mercy. Then the internet came and turned the tables completely. Suddenly, anyone and everyone was able to communicate, broadcast, and consume information at the click of a button, and with no third parties involved.

The blockchain and cryptocurrencies are doing to value what the internet did to communication. Today, value (money, currency, assets, equity, real estate, IP, etc.) is facilitated, governed, and controlled completely by third parties such as Central Banks, commercial banks, brokerages, and so on. Tomorrow, the assets we own will be on the blockchain. They will be managed on a peer-to-peer basis, where the blockchain will act as the “third party of value” (decentralized and governed by fixed, unchangeable rules), just as the internet became the “third party of information”.

The Perfect Curator

For the first time, software can own money.

Now imagine different software built over decentralized blockchain platforms, owning money and having the ability to transact. We’ll call them autonomous agents. The only form of autonomous agents that exist today are computer viruses that live and propagate online. But even these viruses have limited impact or abilities. The autonomous agents of tomorrow will be smart and able to transact.

For example, tomorrow, a media company can have an autonomous agent that has $100 in its digital wallet. Let’s call this agent Frank. Frank will crawl the internet, crowdsourcing and curating content as it goes, and pay for this content with the funds in its wallet. Frank will create monetized websites featuring the content that it bought, and every time the content-populated websites are visited, Frank will receive all the money generated, directly in its digital wallet. Frank will then use this money to crowdsource and curate more content and propagate more websites. The websites that prove to be more appealing will continue to pay for their own ongoing content crowdsourcing and curation, while those with unattractive content will attract low traffic, and as a result have less money to propagate and curate, which will cause them to eventually die out.

Frank will become smarter with time as it learns what people like and don’t like. It will buy smarter content and set smarter digital marketing strategies, and as a result, receive more money and spend it more wisely. The cycle will continue. And Frank will turn into the News Corp. of tomorrow.

Trust 100x

Today, trust is built around a personal relationship, or a group affiliation and trust in its leadership. This trust stems from our belief that a person or group of people will do what we expect them to do. We, today, fully depend on people to make the right decisions, oversee rightfully and honestly, and not sway left or right under political pressure, personal values, or any other factor that affects human reason.

Tomorrow, organizing groups, ideas, and initiatives will be based on protocols, that will do what they are supposed to, as per the code used to write them. They will disperse, spend, and receive money like they are supposed to. Every penny contributed towards them will be accounted for, and its destination clear and transparent. Smart contracts will ensure all rules are enforced.

Millions of people (in a matter of a day) will be able to contribute money towards the wallet of a protocol that governs municipality functions — with zero profit — for that network to function more effectively and honestly than any group of people can or ever did.

The National Bank of Her Phone

Billions are unbanked today. They are excluded from the economic system. They have no form of secure savings, no access to financing, and absolutely no opportunity for prosperity. These people are not profitable to banks, and probably never will be, given the costs incurred by traditional banking and their legacy systems, inefficient processes, and systems that are a result of years of rent seeking.

Tomorrow, a mother of 6 in Nairobi, using her Nokia phone, will access the bitcoin network. She will spend and receive bitcoin, she will borrow and possibly even micro lend. She will be able to invest 0.0001 BTC in the giants of tomorrow, with a click of a button. She will have the opportunity to improve her chances of prosperity. Moreover, she will have, inherently by using the Bitcoin network, a clear and transparent credit history. This credit history will be visible to everyone in the world for them to decide whether or not to lend money to this woman, and if so, at what interest rate.

The creation and facilitation of financial products will be transformed completely. We will be introduced to a world of peer to peer value exchange, total freedom, and endless opportunity.

The above scenarios are only a glimpse of what can occur, and only ones that we’re capable of imagining today with what little knowledge we have of the potential of blockchain technology. Thousands of other more impactful use cases will emerge, and things we couldn’t have possibly imagined will occur.

We must understand that this is much more than a few currencies going through a speculative economic bubble. We are reliving the pre-browser internet era. What is to come is a tsunami of change. The underlying technology of these cryptocurrencies will create more possibilities than the internet did. It is a new era, and whether or not a crash takes place soon, shouldn’t matter.

Cryptocurrencies are here to stay. Regardless of the short term events, the long term is prosperous and bigger than anything we have seen.

So, is bitcoin a bubble? That is for you to decide, based on what you know, and the timeframe being considered.