Cameron Winklevoss — one half of the eponymous family function Winklevoss Capital and co-founder of the Gemini crypto exchange — says Bitcoin'due south (BTC) possibilities go beyond digital gold.

In a tweet posted on Oct. 23, Cameron argued that:

"Considering Bitcoin is open up source software, its possibilities are boundless. I frequently talk about aureate as a target marketplace cap, but that's really but the beginning...information technology's digital gold, source of truth, etc…"

A shared, single "source of truth"

Cameron's argument aims at going beyond the commonplace analogy of Bitcoin with gold, whose proponents compare the scarcity of the precious metal with Bitcoin's finite supply to emphasize the cryptocurrency's office equally a digital shop of value.

While accepting this perspective, his emphasis lies on the revolutionary potential of the cryptocurrency'due south open-source software, which establishes a decentralized digital public record of transactions that is immutable, secure and bearding: a shared, single source of truth.

In information systems, a Source of Truth (SOT) is a term used to denote a trusted data source that gives a complete movie of the information object as a whole.

This robust and trustless model for ensuring data integrity between a massive network of participants is, then — in Cameron'south view — the foundation for the nugget'south unique promise.

Rooting out falsity

Cryptocurrency commentators had previously implicitly conjoined these ii perspectives — on scarcity and integrity — particularly in response to the forgery crisis that plagued the gold industry this summer.

This August, roughly i,000 fake aureate kilogram bars were found in the vaults of major banks such as JPMorgan Chase — with many more than thought likely to have been in circulation.

As ane Bitcoin abet argued at the time:

"Would you lot have gilded every bit payment from someone you didn't trust, without verifying the weight and purity of the gilded before shipping your products to them? Think of a Bitcoin full node every bit a 'fake Bitcoin detector' — all you need to verify 'purity' of your Bitcoin is a Raspberry Pi."