Bitcoin is not bank!

Have you seen the picture showing a disruptive potential of sharing economy (and Facebook)? I was hit by a wave of Facebook posts, Tweets, Linkedin shares. And I really liked it, until someone opened paintbrush and put Bitcoin on.
What is wrong with the statement about Bitcoin? Pretty much everything.

Bitcoin is not a bank
Banks are institutions, they can own things, they have their owners, shareholders etc. Facebook, Airbnb, UBER are companies. But Bitcoin has no institution behind, there is no legal entity with this brand or owning Bitcoin. Nobody can sign a contract as “Bitcoin”. And this decentralization is one of its key defining principles.

Bitcoin is not largest
Ok, even though it is wrong, let’s compare it to other banks. Bitcoin market cap is around 70 billion USD. Yes, it is very volatile, so current value you can check here but it makes no difference for what we need to compare here. And the world’s largest banks? Industrial and Commercial bank of China has total assets of 3 615 billion USD! And if we measure it by market capitalization then no.1 is JP Morgan Chase with 299 billion USD valuation. So not even close for Bitcoin.

Bitcoin cannot have any cash
As I showed in the first point Bitcoin cannot own anything. But this part is not only wrong, it just doesn’t make sense in context with other examples. Cars are essential to taxi business, same as buildings to hotels, etc. This is not true for cash (money in physical form) and banking. Cash is just subgroup of money and role of cash is decreasing. So bank without cash can is not that revolutionary as UBER or Airbnb.

Business Insider published nice perspective of money scale (Bitcoin almost doubled since then).

Did you know that Bill Gates could buy all the bitcoins? :)

So don’t understand me wrong, I am big Bitcoin fan, but let’s just do not share nonsense about it. Bitcoin is quite amazing just as it is, it does not need to compare it with Facebook or Uber by false facts.

So think before you share, and share and upvote if you like this.

Sources:
http://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-compared-to-all-of-the-worlds-money-2017-6
https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/list/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_banks