Most people are initially introduced to Bitcoin as a form of digital currency – a new way of doing money built especially to meet the needs of the 21st century. But, in actual fact, that is just one of a plethora of uses for Bitcoin and the blockchain technology it runs on. The blockchain can be used prove ownership of things other than the coins themselves – enabling the same efficiencies and advantages for the digital trading of securities, for land titles and other property, for insurance claims, as a payment rail for remittances, for settlement between financial institutions, for document stamping and auditing, for customer rewards and crowdfunding, and quite a lot else besides. Each of these uses requires coins to pay for transaction fees and adds to the value of Bitcoin. What this means is that there are multiple paths to success: each of these use-cases is still in the early days of its development, but has the potential to create a revolution in their respective industries – and the success of any single one could drive a significant increase in value for the network they are built on. Think of it like this: investing in BTC could be like investing in the internet during its early days, and I don’t mean like putting your money into dot com start-ups – I mean the actual internet itself. The key difference, of course, is that the internet is free to use while every Bitcoin transaction must be paid
