Ripple CTO Names Bitcoin's Use Cases

David Schwartz, chief executive officer at Ripple, has listed the main Bitcoin use cases in a social media post on X.

“It’s scarce, liquid, valuable, censorship resistant, stable (in everything but value), transferable, jurisdictionless, and, in an important sense, fair,” Schwartz said.

As reported by U.Today, Schwartz previously revealed that he had mined a total of 250 Bitcoins when the leading cryptocurrency was still in its nascency.

“I believe I permanently stopped accumulating BTC before XRP even existed, but I’m not 100% sure,” the Ripple exec said in a 2024 X social media post.

Speculation-based value

According to Schwartz, most of the value in crypto comes from future speculation instead of future utility.

“So if what you care about are future price changes, what people think will happen is much more important than what has happened,” he said.

He has noted that Bitcoin’s current investment thesis is based on speculation about Bitcoin’s future adoption.

Schwartz has acknowledged that speculation was a key driver for enabling utility early on since one, for instance, could not use Bitcoin for purchasing real estate until the price was high enough.

In July, the prominent Ripple executive stated that the set of actual real-world problems that are being solved with crypto is rather small. He has opined that Bitcoin could retain its dominant position due to its “solid” layer-1 and the first-mover advantage.

Moreover, he added that Bitcoin could derive its value from use on other chains and being part of financial services.