How close is to becoming money? New data from BitMEX Research claims that although BTC transactions are now more precise than ever, the cryptocurrency still remains a long way off elusive money status – and believe that precision could actually hurt BTC’s hopes of becoming money.
The big news is that there has been a “marked increase in [BTC] precision in the last 10 years, which surprisingly continued even beyond 2018.”
The authors of the report, named Growth in the Level of Precision of Bitcoin Spending, and published on the BITMEX blog, write,
“Currently over 70% of bitcoin outputs use the highest available degree of precision (one satoshi), considerable growth since the approx. 40% level in 2012.”
However, the authors also note that most economists believe that for any commodity to be classified as money, it must meet three key criteria, in order.
The BitMEX Research team outlines these as follows:
- Bitcoin must become a medium of exchange
- BTC needs to be able to store value
- Bitcoin must become a unit of account
The researchers say that “Bitcoin’s potential unique capability” in the area of “censorship-resistant electronic payments” could give it a key boost in the first step, its quest to become a medium of exchange.
But the researchers say that the final stage is bitcoin’s “most ambitious and least likely step.” To attain unit of account status, mainstream businesses and governments would , and bitcoin would become the currency most used in accounting documentation.
