Blog 10

 What is money exactly? At its core, money represents value. If I do some work for you,       you give me money in exchange for the value I gave you. I can then use that money to get something of value from someone else in the future. Throughout history, value has taken many forms and people used a lot of different materials to represent money. However, in order for something to represent value people have to trust that it is indeed valuable and will stay valuable long enough for them to redeem that value in the future.       

 Bitcoin is the Internet of money and it’s offering a decentralized solution to money.  Bitcoin has several advantages over the current system.  First, it gives you complete control over your money.  With Bitcoin, you and you alone can access your funds. No government or bank can decide to freeze your account or confiscate your holdings.  Bitcoin also cuts a lot of the middlemen from the process of transferring money.  This means that in many cases,  Bitcoin is cheaper to use than traditional wire transfers or money orders.  Also, unlike fiat currencies,  Bitcoin was designed to be digital by nature,  this means you can add additional layers of programming on top of it  and turn it into “smart money”,  Finally, Bitcoin opens up digital commerce to  billion people around the world  who don’t have access to the current banking system.  These people are unbanked or under banked because of where they leave and the reality that they have been born into.  However, today, with a mobile phone and a click of a button they can start trading using Bitcoin, no permission needed.  Today there are several merchants online and offline that accept Bitcoin.  You can order a flight or book a hotel with Bitcoin if you like.  There are even Bitcoin debit cards that allow you to pay at almost any store with your Bitcoin balance.  However the road toward acceptance by the majority of the public is still a long one.