Transferwise CEO Taavet Hinrikus made an interesting point at Techcrunch Disrupt this week, saying that he thought the invention of Bitcoin had been “driven by greed… nobody’s asking for it.”

It would seem Bitcoin is struggling to find an audience outside its early adopters.

Uphold CEO Anthony Watson also said that he thought the blockchain - the technology behind bitcoin - was a far bigger deal, saying: “I don’t think bitcoin is going to be anywhere as important as people say it is today… the blockchain is very transformative.”

Just the Beginning

And I think he’s right. Bitcoin is a bit of a plaything for techies, really. No one has a clue how to regulate it - it’s like the Wild West all over again!

The blockchain is the financial industry’s big buzzword of 2016. Goldman Sachs said in a recent research note to clients that the blockchain “can change… well, everything” and 30 banks have joined an industry-wide partnership looking for use cases.

The blockchain helps us to answer questions like: “how do we get multiple computers to agree on certain pieces of data” or “how do we handle faults in the system if a computer goes down or gets hacked?”

Risks & Threats

But no one’s really clocked how to use it for moving money locally, let alone internationally - and it’s just too early to know if there is a real use case for it and how people will use it. My problem with Blockchain is that promotes anonymity within an industry that already has major issues with transparency.

It’s hard to judge whether blockchain tech will become more prevalent in our future - the bigger question is to whether they will re-define existing legacy systems and affect the way we use financial services.

There is hope in the future that using financial services will become as simple as sending an email. An American friend of mine visited the UK recently and seemed astonished at the sight of contactless cards and the fact that the use of cheques is virtually extinct in the UK - so maybe we’re a little further away than I thought.

Image courtesy of bitcointalk.org