Digital Currency of Future Bitcon

No digital currency will soon dislodge the dollar, but bitcoin is much more than a currency. It is a radically new, decentralized system for managing the way societies exchange value. It is, quite simply, one of the most powerful innovations in finance in 500 years.The digital currency known as bitcoin is only six years old, and many of its critics are already declaring it dead. But such dire predictions miss a far more important point: Whether bitcoin survives or not, the technology underlying it is here to stay. In fact, that technology will become ever more influential as developers create newer, better versions and clones. Bitcoin has some indisputable flaws, at least in its current iteration. Its price fluctuates too wildly. (Who wants the cost of their groceries to vary by 10% from week to week?) Its anonymity has made it a haven for drug dealers. “Wallets” (as the individual software applications that manage bitcoin holdings are known) have proven vulnerable to cyberattack and pillaging, including the wallets of big exchanges such as Tokyo’s Mt. Gox and Slovenia’s Bitstamp. The workings of bitcoin and other digital currencies can be confusing. When we think of a currency in the abstract, we tend to think of a physical currency in the offline world—a dollar bill or a gold coin—so we imagine bitcoin as some sort of digitally rendered equivalent, much as a Word document is a digital stand-in for a physical page of text. But there is no such thing as the digital equivalent of a dollar bill. Bitcoins exist purely as entries in an accounting system—a transparent public ledger known as the “blockchain” that records balances and transfers among special bitcoin “addresses.” Owning bitcoin doesn’t mean having a digital banknote in a digital pocket; it means having a claim to a bitcoin address, with a secret password, and the right to transfer its balances to someone else. 

With bitcoin, the balances held by every user of the monetary system are instead recorded on a widely distributed, publicly displayed ledger that is kept up-to-date by thousands of independently owned, competing computers known as “miners.”

To understand how it works and why it is more efficient and less expensive than the existing system, let’s take a single example: buying a cup of coffee at your local coffee shop. If you pay with a credit card, the transaction seems simple enough: You swipe your card, you grab your cup, you leave.

In fact, the financial system is just getting started with you and the coffee shop. Before the store actually gets paid and your bank balance falls, more than a half-dozen institutions—such as a billing processor, the card association ( Visa , MasterCard , etc.), your bank, the coffee shop’s bank, a payment processor, the clearinghouse network managed by the regional Federal Reserve Banks—will have shared part of your account information or otherwise intervened in the flow of money.

If all goes well, your bank will confirm your identity and good credit and send payment to the coffee shop’s bank two or three days later. For this privilege, the coffee shop pays a fee of between 2% and 3%.

Now let’s pay in bitcoin, assuming that your favorite coffee shop accepts it (more than 82,000 merchants world-wide already do). If you don’t already have bitcoins, you will need to buy some from one of a host of online exchanges and brokerages, using a simple transfer from your regular bank account. You will then assign the bitcoins to a wallet, which functions like an online account.

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Milan Tomic

Hi. I’m Designer of Blog Magic. I’m CEO/Founder of ThemeXpose. I’m Creative Art Director, Web Designer, UI/UX Designer, Interaction Designer, Industrial Designer, Web Developer, Business Enthusiast, StartUp Enthusiast, Speaker, Writer and Photographer. Inspired to make things looks better.

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