Bitcoin: How Can a Virtual Currency Attain Real Market Value

Bitcoin script could be harnessed to accommodate P2P lending, perhaps based on a peer consensus for approval, on a case-by-case basis (credit worthiness could be cribbed from other platforms, such as eBay); a signature would release payment under certain conditions of protocol, with a contract being programmed to satisfy requisites. This would provide genuine alternatives to the current borrowing options and ignite healthy competition.

“a medium of exchange that operates like a currency in some environments, but does not have all the attributes of real currency”.

To summarise: There is a social demand, even pressure, for a medium of exchange whose use value is not that it can be planted and harvested, milked or consumed, but rather that it acts as a kind of buffer against the complication of wants remaining unsatisfied due to a mistiming in the availability of such goods to be exchanged. The medium of exchange isn’t completely arbitrary, it has to have certain key properties in order to be fit for purpose, and it may be that a change in the marketplace transforms the medium of exchange into something more applicable. It may be that gold, for example, starts to lose its lustre as a convenient medium of exchange in favour of something more pragmatic and suited to a changing infrastructure.