I really like how Bitcoin brought up so much new energy into the cryptocurrencies world. It combined great ideas of P2P networks, proof of work, append-only databases, and others together into a working and popular system and spawn new ideas and new innovation. It started a new cycle of decentralization of technologies.

But as a currency itself, it lacks innovation. It is still an one-dimensional numeric-like value used to valuate everything humans do in the same traditional way. Bitcoin is often compared to the Internet, how it brings a new era. But if we are comparing it with the Internet, then it is the Internet at the stage where people would take physical books, scan them as images, and make them available online. No interactivity, no multimedia, no searching or social capabilities, no additional value besides digitizing the content in the most simple way. Bitcoin does the same. It just digitizes existing concept of money. It does this in an interesting and innovative way, but it is still just a digital image of money.

It is important to notice that traditional money was already a form of the Internet. A global information exchange network exchanging numerical values of transactions. In fact, it was already digital (numeric), with various transport layers (gold, coins, banknotes, and recently Internet itself). But it is not so fancy and is full of rules and conditions if you want to participate in this global network. So a reboot was necessary.

Now we got a different implementation, decentralized one, using modern computer science techniques, but the content is still the same. Despite being modern, transactions still record only a numerical value/valuation of the transaction itself. It is still a great reduction of information of what exactly the transaction was about. Such reduction was maybe reasonable for traditional money, where technology allowed passing around only one number, but today we should move on.

Bitcoin innovation is continuing, with all new projects building on ideas, trying new ideas, expanding and diversifying the ecosystem. Ethereum is for example building a general purpose computing platform on top of these ideas. All this is beautiful. But we should also innovate what money itself is, and do we even need it in such form? Bitcoin revolution should not be just a technological innovation. It should start asking questions about the nature of money itself.