If you believe that the world is moving towards a digital future, it makes sense that so too, will money. With that in mind, Bitcoin (BTC) and, more specifically, the blockchain that produces Bitcoin, allows us to digitize money so that you can own it like cash.
Think about how we use cash, we put some in a safe for a “rainy day”, we give some to our children to help them buy a car or help them with a downpayment on their first house. In other words we do with cash what we want to do. Bitcoin brings some of those same features and also, as a result, some of the risks (to those in “charge”) that cash brings. Risks such as buying things and giving money to people/organizations that our Government disallows it’s private citizens to do, but for the banks, they turn the other cheek.
There are also many other important differences that Bitcoin provides from cash. I’ll touch on my top three here. First and what makes it sound money, is that Bitcoin has a set and dwindling supply of 21 million (ending in 2034). Unlike cash that is endlessly, and stealthily, printed at the leisure of central bankers. Bitcoin is also decentralized and regulated via the protocol that it was built on. A protocol that cannot be changed or manipulated without the majority of the users of Bitcoin agreeing, something that as Bitcoin grows will become increasingly more difficult. And finally what I feel brings money into the future is that Bitcoin is programmable. Programmable so that in the digital world of the future, for example, employers can program their accounts to pay employees accounts literally by the hour or even minute if needed. Programmable so that your refrigerator can pay for the milk or your car pay the toll. Bitcoin brings money to a new level in ways that we will all soon see, that’s why you should care about Bitcoin.
How do I know Bitcoin will survive in the future?
Bitcoin is produced every 10 minutes as a result of specialized computers called miners solving complex cryptographic problems to produce them. Those miners spend electricity to produce the bitcoin in a process called Proof of Work (PoW). Many believe that Proof of Work is the biggest idea brought about in Bitcoin’s White Paper because it allows trustless and distributed consensus via nodes and miners. Trustless and distributed consensus means that if you send and/or receive money from anyone across the world you don’t need to trust in third-party services. There are few a PoW blockchains competing with Bitcoin, but they all require the same computation to produce the associated asset pitting Bitcoin against any other PoW system such as Bcash (BCH). The size, distribution and first mover advantage in Bitcoin makes it very difficult and expensive to dethrone. The fact that most of the leading cryptographers in the world are working on Bitcoin
