Do you know my biggest pet peeve about people’s understanding of bitcoin?

They think of it only as money.

This narrow scope keeps people from appreciating the bigger picture: bitcoin is the unit of account for a peer-to-peer electronic cash system.

Everybody can patch into that system and use it for whatever purpose they want. To date, that’s mostly buying and selling it. Within the next year or two, far beyond.

Scoff if you want. In the past year or so, ventures like Sovryn, Lightning Network, Opennode, and RSK built the foundations for scalable payment and financial rails on bitcoin’s blockchain.

Soon, sidechains, smart contracts, and settlement platforms will use bitcoin as a permissionless settlement protocol for all sorts of transactions.

It’s only a matter of time.

Rome wasn’t built in a day

Why hasn’t that happened yet?

Because people only started thinking about bitcoin this way for about five years, once it dawned on them that bitcoin could do more than “go up” and “short the bankers.”

You can’t expect to change the world in five years. Even Facebook took almost a decade to reach the Fortune 500.

If bitcoin weren’t bitcoin, nobody would care about the pace of its development.

Technological advances always result from years and decades of iteration and experimentation. Microchips, jet engines, steel construction beams, electricity, and all other common inventions took a long time to fulfill their potential.

The difference is, you can’t hang a price on those technologies. You can’t break those concepts into small units and exchange them for more of your government’s money. There’s no way to “go long” on a jet engine.

But you can do all that with bitcoin.

It’s natural to talk about bitcoin’s price and how to trade it, but that obscures a fundamental truth:

It’s not bitcoin that gives this electronic cash system its value. It’s the system that gives bitcoin its value.

Eventually, this system will serve as a global settlement layer for all sorts of transactions. When you exchange “things,” you will use a product or service built on bitcoin’s public, open, permissionless blockchain. An app or API will convert all payments into your local currency instantly, for a fraction of Visa’s service fee.

As Elon Musk says, it’s inevitable.

Few people will hold actual bitcoin in any quantity. They will continue to use local currencies, with APIs and merchant services converting their money in and out of bitcoin on demand.

And altcoins?

A few altcoins will play key roles in the financial networks of the future.

You won’t think about them as investments, just things you use to get what you want. E.g., you’ll buy a little basic attention token (BAT) when you want to publish an ad. You won’t expect to get rich, you just want to make sure a real person sees your ad.

In time, many altcoins will migrate to a bitcoin sidechain, but some will persist. Not only will they have loyal users and large networks, but they will offer something distinct and essential. People will not want to give them up without a compelling reason to switch to something else.

People love convenient, familiar experiences that we can share with others.

So, maybe BAT will serve as the de facto currency for the internet while bitcoin does everything else, simply because that’s what people get used to.

This will happen whether or not you make money from selling your crypto for more than you bought it for.

In fact, your need to get rich quick may keep you from appreciating the revolution unfolding before your very eyes.

A whole new world

New projects are challenging our contemporary notions of economics, privacy, commerce, and monetary policy. Developers and entrepreneurs are building entire financial systems build de novo from laptops and discord channels, released at a global scale and accessible to anybody with an internet connection.

For example, look at Yearn Finance.

Its token, YFI, exists solely to transfer value into other assets. Speculators buy YFI tokens expecting YFI’s price to go up. This subsidizes rewards for users and developers.

That’s great as long as the price of the token goes up. What happens when it doesn’t? How long do you think speculators will stick around?

Perhaps the value lies beyond the token.

Towards the end of last year, Yearn Finance started merging with other projects—decentralized financial protocols, swapping platforms, borrowing/lending services, developer communities, liquidity providers, and thought leaders who contribute to the growth and development of YFI’s ecosystem.

As a result, YFI tokens don’t need a way to capture value. If Yearn Finance grows into the best DeFi platform on earth, people will need YFI tokens. Like season tickets to your favorite sports team, YFI will be the cost of admission.

Time will tell whether these mergers will enhance the value of YFI or its ecosystem. Some of those merged projects are really strong, but others have flaws in their smart contracts (and one of them basically died after 90% of its users pulled their funds off of its platform).

Developers plan to fix all of these problems. Let’s assume they do.

What sort of contagion could spread from faulty smart contracts or hidden attack vectors? What about collusion among participants? Can one component steal from another? How will the market set a price for the new governance structures? Will these combinations create synergies or spillovers among projects, or cannibalize each others’ users? Will the mergers make these networks more resilient and secure, or less?

We shall see. I can’t wait to see how it turns out.

Welcome to the Age of Monetary Exploration

Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow

In a year or two, you’ll feel silly that you ever worried about a $36,000 bitcoin and you may even get mad that you took profits at that price. Likewise for a $36,000 YFI token.

In a decade, you may feel silly about thinking YFI would serve as a global financial platform at all, instead of some other technology built on bitcoin’s blockchain.

At this moment, you probably don’t care. Bitcoin’s price dropped 7% today and that awesome new altcoin didn’t go up as much as the other one your friend bought last week.

Would you rather get upset that your altcoin went up *only* 20% in a month or marvel that you have a ringside seat for the development of new financial networks, play a small part in their growth, and see the value of your investment grow many times over?

Over time, some of these new financial networks will capture enormous value and the price of their tokens will explode. The only question is which ones will win and which will lose.

Bitcoin will gradually subsume almost all of them.

Before we get to that point, ask yourself what you’re trying to get out of this market.

Some people like to make money. Others like to build wealth.

Some people want to get rich. Others want to create a better future for themselves and everybody around them.

Which type of person are you?

Mark Helfman publishes the Crypto is Easy newsletter. He is also a top bitcoin writer on Medium and Hacker Noon. His books, Consensusland and Bitcoin or Bust: Wall Street’s Entry Into Cryptocurrency, explore the social, cultural, and business challenges of cryptocurrency. Learn more about him in his bio.

Originally published on Voice.com.