For those who are tired of playing the central banker’s fiat currency game of Monopoly, the benefits of Bitcoin easily outweigh the negatives. Being a digital currency is far from all that Bitcoin can do, and is just the first application, but creating sound global currency anyone can use is one hell of an app!
Here's Part One of THIRTY reasons why the future of money is changing due to the technological innovations of Bitcoin (You will get fifteen of them today and fifteen more tomorrow in Part Two.) So, let us begin with the most obvious….
The First Global Peer-to-Peer Monetary System
Thought you needed a government to have money? That is so 20th century! Bitcoin is the money of The People, for The People, by The People. There have always been local currencies since people were trading chicken eggs for cow’s milk. Now, trade money digitally. No animals, private printing presses, or interest rates needed.
The Block Chain - Bitcoin’s Public Transaction Ledger
Bitcoin’s Blockchain has been praised worldwide by even the establishment’s biggest players for its revolutionary abilities. It represents the heart of the Bitcoin protocol and provides a way to track all BTC transactions. This public ledger will be able to replace paper trails, lawyers, and many other things adding friction to the current monetary system. Record-keeping made for the Internet and the 21st century. Central banks wish their technology worked this well, and they will look to adopt Bitcoin superior technology in the coming years.
Ultra-Flexible and Transferable
Bitcoin can most easily be transferred online, yes, but it can be sent in many other ways. Your feature phone, not even a smartphone, can send it by SMS text message. You can receive it in your paper wallet. It can be sent in Morse Code in "Burst". And soon, you can send it via satellite nodes into outer space. What do you need to transmit bitcoin? Two nodes with the Block Chain. I think the world can handle that from now on.
Welcome to a World of Altcoins
Before there was Bitcoin, there were no altcoins. Bitcoin begets other amazing digital currency technologies, with amazing features that may be added to Bitcoin in the future. In baseball, altcoins would be the minor league farm team that can have young talent occasionally join the big league team.
There may be a time when sending a bitcoin may not be desirable, and different forms of digital currency may be required. Maybe someone wants even more security, greater anonymity, faster transactions, or just to use full coins instead of millibitcoins. In the future, there will be an altcoin to fit your needs.
Programmable money
A little ahead of even the savvy Bitcoin users of today, a "Smart contract”, coined by Nick Szabo over twenty years ago, can be a big part of our future. This enables a contract to go automatically into effect once conditions are met, such as payments, signatures, or periods of time elapse. In other words, Bitcoin has made money programmable and gives us another reason to phase out lawyers.
You’re in control of your bitcoins; Governments? Not so much.
Governments adore fiat currency because they get to abuse it at will, while the citizens pay the price for their malfeasance. Inflation is a government scheme to factor into a flawed fiat currency system.
Bitcoin doesn’t have such Keynesian economic flaws. Governments don’t control Bitcoin, steal citizens' money, manipulate its volume or fix interest rates. Governments have a very bad habit of creating more and more money until a fiat currency is worthless. You can almost set your clock by it. Owners of bitcoin know the total amount that will ever be in existence (just under 21 million coins) and don’t worry about inflation anymore.
Bitcoins are much faster than dollars
Speed kills and Bitcoin’s speed may kill fiat currencies. To say Bitcoin is faster than what we have now would be a gross understatement. Have you ever tried to move $100,000 USD or Euros to another country before? As a former banker, I’ve done it countless times and it's not a fluid or efficient system, currently.
After you travel to the bank, play twenty questions with the bank officers, pay the wire fees, and wait for approval and transfer, the recipient on the other side does the same - you've lost at least a day. Bitcoin transactions of millions of dollars, in a matter of seconds, for negligible fees, are now commonplace. In a decade or so, your local bank will be able to do the same as Bitcoin can do today. Maybe.
Crowdfunding without the crowd
Imagine you are a farmer in Argentina, and you need the equivalent of US $1,000 to buy materials, food, and animals to expand your farming business. Place your Bitcoin address QR code on your web page, or someone else's webpage, or even on the outside of your house, and people anywhere in the world can crowdfund your business. No checks, ID, or signature required.
Welcome to new world of Micropayments
Do you have a blog? Would you like to get paid for your new videos, stories, or interviews? Or you can pay your favorite author or content creator easily with bitcoin. When primitive merchant account payments are under about US$5, the fees required to send these transactions make payments very inefficient.
Since bitcoin transactions are peer-to-peer, with no middleman, and cost less than a penny, the money goes where you want it, and "the cost of doing business” becomes a distant memory as profits go where you wanted all along.
Easily move your wealth
Let's say you had 10 Gold bars or one million dollars that you’d like to take to another country. (You are still silly enough to think a grown, free man should be able to do so, freely.) If you don't get robbed first, you will meet some police or government official at the border or airport, and they will make it very difficult for you to do so, freely.
With Bitcoin, you can make a "brain wallet," a collection of words you can memorize, that will bring your entire Bitcoin wallet contents with you anywhere in the world without a single question about your net worth being asked. The Gestapo is defeated before they even check your papers! Bitcoin 1. Gestapo 0.
Makes merchant accounts obsolete
I have an idea. Forget merchant accounts! Have one bitcoin wallet for your personal bitcoin and one wallet for your business account, on the house. No fees, no monthly invoices/statements, and no “customer service” needed. Just get paid fast, with no middlemen. Sound better than a 2.9% fee, plus a charge per transaction?
Brings private banking to remote 3rd-world areas
Ok, let’s say you weren't lucky enough live in a modern metropolitan city with a pizzeria around the corner. What if you lived in a remote area of Africa, with no 4G or cable TV? You just weren’t fortunate enough to have a car in your town, much less a car company. You may live 50 miles from the nearest town with just a dirt road and a mountain between you and a banking relationship? How would you do business locally, much less globally?
With Bitcoin, even with modest SMS messaging on your basic phone, you can transact business globally. You are the bank. Buy, sell and trade worldwide, with no banking fees. No car, debit card or ID required.
Bitcoin is definitely real money
I’m sure someone a very long time ago said “What is that? Shiny gold rocks? That’s not real money. No, we only accept feathers here.” We have since evolved past trading seashells, feathers, chunks of gold, notches on “Tally sticks,” to the current fiat currency system. Now, as countries like Greece collapse under the debt of the fraudulent currency creation, the world is just about ready for digital currencies, led by bitcoin.
Bitcoin is probably more real than the cash in your pocket. There is no such thing as a fake or counterfeit bitcoin, but the money you have right now could be a fake. Any fiat currency has and will get duplicated, after a few years in service, that's why their look of it changes every few years. Counterfeiting is expensive to counteract and brings distrust to the currency and the market. Again, something Bitcoin technology has been engineered to stop from Day One.
Plus money, by definition, holds value over time. Fiat currency or dollars lose value due to inflation, so dollars are legally called currency, not money. Bitcoins appreciate over time, so they qualify as real money. People all over the world receive their salary in Bitcoin, including ME! If you can earn an income through it, and it holds its value over time, you have money.
Save trees. Get timestamps of bitcoin ownership and purchases The Bitcoin Block Chain keeps a record of all purchases made with a particular bitcoin or the ownership trail of a bitcoin through the Blockchain. Evolve past the old paper receipt system.
Instantly make any company or nation fiscally responsible and transparent
A government or even a country COULD become truly "transparent" by utilizing the Bitcoin Blockchain for all or some of their departments of services. Countries like Honduras are already experimenting with the blockchain for a land registry, for example.
Or maybe there is a great deal of corruption in a particular department that the government would like to stamp out? The budget for that department could be metered out in bitcoin only with the Blockchain acting as a company ledger for that department's activity. Accounting is lawyer-free, inexpensive and instantaneous.
And since bitcoin appreciates over time, sans any known market bubbles, that department reaps the benefits and can grow through reinvestment, or take annual bonuses (in bitcoin, of course!)
Ability to replace, or complement, the fiat currency system
For consumers, you can live on bitcoin, and replace fiat currency altogether. Many people, like Bitcoin legend, Andreas Antonopoulos get paid, live, and travel exclusively via bitcoin. Nations are very, very unlikely to adopt a decentralized digital currency to represent their nation, but it could be done. Governments are all about control.
The word government even means "control mind" in the Latin root. What Bitcoin can do is be the next version of PayPal, only so much more than that, as you’ll see. Everybody can have a bitcoin account to move money easily online while still using a government-issued currency for income and taxes. You can have the best of both worlds.