Elaine Ou, Columnist

Yes, Bitcoin Is a Means of Payment. Just Not Yet for You

It's great for big transactions. The challenge is handling smaller ones.

January 22, 2018 at 11:00 PM UTC

Elaine Ou is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. She is a blockchain engineer at Global Financial Access in San Francisco. Previously she was a lecturer in the electrical and information engineering department at the University of Sydney.

Still not a Bitcoin purchase.
Photographer: Joe Raedle/Gettty Images

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Critics of Bitcoin often argue that it’s useless as a means of payment, one of the key elements of any successful currency. That’s not quite right, and likely to become less so.

First, a reminder on how Bitcoin works. If I want to send someone some Bitcoin, I simply broadcast my intention to the network. I then wait for the transaction to be picked up by “miners,” who process transactions in return for fees and newly minted Bitcoin. If all goes well, my transaction will be included in a block, which becomes part of the global immutable ledger known as the Bitcoin blockchain. (Disclosure: I own some Bitcoin, because as a blockchain engineer I sometimes receive it as payment.)