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Bitcoin is in the same as the Internet was in 1960. It can restore the control of money from the the Banks to our hands.


When the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency first implemented a working version of the Internet in the 1960s it seemed like a fringe experiment not dissimilar to Bitcoin today. It wasn’t until a protocol called TCP/IP emerged in the 1970s and was commercialized that the Internet was positioned to take off. In short, this protocol allowed every website and service built on it to have its own “address” and a way to communicate information. This averted chaos, allowing users to find what they were looking for, allowing websites to work together and enabling networks to do the hard lifting of directing traffic in an orderly and predictable way. Without TCP/IP, the Internet as we know it would not exist.
Bitcoin today is in roughly the same development phase that TCP/IP was back then. Instead of IP addresses and websites, Bitcoin has unique strings that represent money and a mechanism to send these strings securely and safely wherever you want. It is a protocol that is allowing money to flow around the world much like TCP/IP allows information to flow -- in an orderly, predictable way.
This is not a theory; it happens every day. The Bitcoin economy, while still in its infancy, is about $2 billion (meaning, the value of all Bitcoins) and rising. New services appear daily -- exchanges, digital wallets, payment processors, along with companies that accept Bitcoin alongside dollars, euros and yen for traditional services. In addition, a small and growing group of technologists are getting behind the currency, allocating time and capital to building a robust ecosystem.
Bitcoin is being used all over the world in a wide range of ways already: to avoid the high fees of using a Visa card in San Paulo; to settle the purchase of a million dollar home in Buenos Aires; to pay a mechanic for services in Lagos; to provide Egyptians access to a liquid currency. The list goes on.
Bitcoin provides a safe way for anyone, anywhere to send, receive or store his or her money. By contrast, consumers are realizing that the traditional banking system shouldn’t be trusted. Why store my money with strangers who may make crazy bets on derivatives (JPMorgan)? Why keep my money in a bank that could threaten to seize it (Cyprus)? Why keep my hard-earned savings in a currency that could be devalued because of an incompetent government (Argentina)?
All of this said, the emergence of a robust Bitcoin economy won’t all be positive. Bad actors will use Bitcoin for drug dealing, porn and financing terrorism. However, this already happens every day with gold, dollars and other currencies; it's not a reason to shut Bitcoin down. Which -- did I mention this? -- is not actually possible anyway.
There is no central server, no central authority and no owner. Bitcoin can be slowed but not shuttered. And even if the U.S. Government decides it is anti-Bitcoin, many other countries will either tacitly or explicitly support it. China. Russia. Switzerland. Iceland. Singapore. Suffice it to say that the geopolitical ramifications of a robust Bitcoin economy are mind-boggling, beginning with a completely peer-to-peer banking system that works by and between people and ending with a world that no longer relies on the U.S. dollar as the reserve currency of all assets.
The opportunity here is to think constructively about a world in which money flows are more transparent (Bitcoin), easy (Bitcoin), cheap (Bitcoin) and secure (Bitcoin). Does the Bitcoin economy need regulation? Possibly. Much like virtual guardrails enabled the Internet to thrive, the Bitcoin ecosystem may need something similar to begin rebalancing the financial services landscape.
A lot is happening in the rapidly expanding bitcoin world. see: http://bitcoincharts.com/

For the basics: http://drkhalid.blogspot.com/2013/05/i-am-your-money-i-am-bitcoin-basic.html


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