Bitcoin is probably the most fungible currency ever created.
Ethereum has taken what was a four-function calculator of a programming language in Bitcoin and turned it into a full-fledged computer.
Cryptocurrencies in general give us a stable medium through which we can communicate our information about values and prices in a way that no government mandarin can distort or usurp. For the predators who have used our central institutions to predate on the rest of humanity, it's a very bad development.
Distributed ledger technology is fashionable. In fact, if you could wear it, you'd put Ralph Lauren out of business, at least in my case.
I call the blockchain 'the Internet of value' and 'the Internet of trust.' Because everything becomes trustless. It's a big distributed ledger. Think of it like an Excel file that's being maintained and updated and managed by millions of computers around the world.
The virtues of the blockchain is that it would be that it's peer-to-peer settlement - no centralized settlement, no manipulation... And most importantly, there's nothing to capture. It's consensus based. It's stateless.
With Bitcoin hard-coded to be limited, it’s like a collectible.
By design, Bitcoin is a scarce resource with a predictable supply of new issuance. And it is this scarcity and predictable supply that make it so attractive as an underlying asset to bind to economic activity and trade.
Bitcoin offers one service: securely time-stamped, scripted transactions. Everything else is built on the edge-devices as an application. Bitcoin allows any application to be developed independently, without permission, on the edge of the network.