Stripe Blog Follow @stripe on twitter Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective Greg Brockman , July 21, 2014 Many people have remarked that Bitcoin resembles the internet in the early 90s: we haven’t yet built the Googles that will make it accessible or the Facebooks and Netflixes that will make it broadly useful. So it’s an open question: what might a Bitcoin that’s useful for the mainstream look like? Money has three functions: it’s a store of value (that is, somewhere you can put your life savings), a unit of account (that is, a measure of value), and a medium of exchange (a way to transport value). On the first two fronts, Bitcoin has shown promise in high-inflation economies , but it’s a much tougher sell for mainstream consumers in stable countries. There, consumers mostly want a safe place to hold their savings, and the existing bank account insurances and consu...