I would describe this article as a very premature lap of honor. Any commodity with 100% native volatility would make “wholly predictable” moves up and down such as bitcoin has done.

There was nothing wrong with the VHS cassette tape – would John Authers have said Netflix was “a solution in search of a problem”. Is John still paying 1000’s of pounds in long distance phone charges when interviewing his “sources” or is he using Skype? Indeed this digital article is proof itself that the world demands digital solutions or we would be reading the physical pink pages.

This solution is a) faster b) cheaper c) global. Give me one industry when offered that formula has turned it down?

The venture capital he talks about is real. Tens of millions a month at the moment – a faster investment pace that in the 1995 internet craze. I know the companies and the apps well. A year ago I would have said blockchain.info had the best app. I was stunned to see how much better coinbase looked a few months later. I was similarly stunned to see the Circle application at the Amsterdam bitcoin conference in May this year. And yesterday I was bowled over to see bitreserve.org’s new offering. These developers are leapfrogging each other, building out this open source community and honing in on the ultimate consumer of bitcoin – Joe Public.

So yesterday on the bitreserve platform I did the following. Logged on, created an account, funded it with some bitcoin, then emailed , yes EMAILED, some Euros, some Yen and some Sterling to friends. I bet if you walked into a bank, cold, and tried to do that it would take a week. The fees were, all in, less than 1%. It’s a bank killer.

As to whether bitcoin, the first application to sit on blockchain, will win – who knows? We think it will and in spectacular fashion. After all, when you see how well bitcoin can “rail” other currencies you will be left thinking WHY you use other currencies at all. I think bitcoin will co-exist with other fiats for a long time before consuming them all – like the Euro consumed other EU currencies (in a different way).

Where is John Authers “donate” button – oh, he doesn't have one.