Bitcoin (BTC) has continued to rise from an esoteric cryptocurrency known only to geeks and enthusiasts into a media sensation. Of the major hurdles to its eventual adoption as a digital currency have been the lack of involvement in technology—especially that of mobile. Recently, however, much of that has been changing with the advent of apps for smartphones that enable bitcoin transactions.

Now BitTrust has come onto the scene with a library and an API designed to make life easier for developers of applications and apps. In their write up on the library, The Next Web compares the API to an eBay for Bitcoin,

BitTrust has the lofty goal of providing a feedback system much like eBay’s, in which traders and retailers are rated and reviewed by buyers. The seller doesn’t have to be identified and can retain their anonymity if they wish, with the system working off their chain of transactions and the ratings provided for those transactions.

It seems like a great first step towards providing verifiability and trust in such an unregulated economy. The strength of the system is that the ratings aren’t fragmented; all developers will be able to access the same ratings for sellers whether they were rated through another application or not.

Since the P2P mechanism underlying Bitcoin already delivers a basis to send messages and a reputation system, the library itself isn’t a first-step towards providing verifiability and trust—that’s built into Bitcoin. What it does do, however, is give developers an easy way to integrate Bitcoin operations into their applications and apps. As a stumbling block, this is the biggest one: overall adoption.

With the BitTrust API, developers will be able to slot in the capability to use bitcoins as part of transactions, which will give users of those apps a lot more places to use bitcoins or to look into using them themselves. Also, point-in-fact, bitcoins offer a brilliant alternative to a lot of microtransaction services that use a type of “game gold” across a bunch of published games or services for a single company. Since bitcoins can be split down to a thousandth-of-a-bitcoin they represent the ultimate microtransaction currency.

What will really solidify actual trust in the Bitcoin universe, however, will be a modicum of stability and fundability in their economic value sources. Right now, most bitcoin transactions occur as speculators move them about while very few transactions represent actual use as a currency to buy and trade commodities and items. The recent Mt. Gox hack caused a massive upheaval for bitcoin moguls (and the economy itself—an event which threatened to destroy the marketplace) but in the wake of those hacks, the market has realigned itself and exchanges are thinking of acting more like actual banks. Even the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an early adopter of bitcoins as donations, decided the legal ramifications were too much for them to keep a connection to the cryptocurrency.

As more technologies emerge that use bitcoins, as more web pages accept them, as more mobile phones are capable of transferring them, more and more will bitcoins be able to act as a real-world currency. The NFC-enabled Android Bitcoin Wallet app represents that solid first-step in making bitcoins an actionable currency that people can use in a market. It will be the activity of consumers and producers actually using the cryptocurrency as a trading commodity that will level its market and put it into a stable place that should grow more trust in its establishment.

After all, with any commodity it’s the value conferred to it by the activity of equitable trading that will establish its fundamental worth.