Why Bitcoin is something you should definitely pay attention to

There's been a lot of hype over the past few weeks over Bitcoin, a digital currency that some are calling one of the most ingenious (and risky) inventions conceived during the Internet Age.

In layman's terms, Bitcoin is a currency that runs in some ways like traditional currency: a person can use Bitcoins online to pay for items, services or anything that regular currency allows a person to buy. Bitcoin proponents hope the currency will one day be on par with the U.S. dollar or British pound sterling as a currency investors can buy into.

This is where Bitcoin parts company with currencies regulated by governments. Bitcoin, unlike, say, the U.S. dollar, has no central bank-like issuer. Bitcoins are traded through peer-to-peer networks online through so-called "Bitcoin miners" that confirm transactions every 10 minutes.

What makes Bitcoin so interesting is how it bypasses all the traditional methods of controlling money transfers in favour of the decentralized Internet.

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There's some very tempting elements to Bitcoin, too: transactions are mostly free, there's a strict market cap of 21 million Bitcoins to keep the currency in line with conventional laws of supply-and-demand, and — perhaps most important of all — it's anonymous. Bitcoin exchanges can't be stopped or seized by governments. It's also the most secure method of exchanging money in existence.

Of course, with any relatively new, disruptive technology, there's bound to be a combination of both early, near-fanatical adopters and skeptical, even dismissive voices.

There's no doubt that Bitcoin has captured a lot of people's attention. While recent events have begun to suggest that Bitcoin's value is volatile and there's a market "bubble" at work here, the technology is going to change a lot of things. You should pay attention to Bitcoin.

Here's why.

Bitcoin changes the way we think about being anonymous online

Let's be honest about something: anyone who believes in 2013 that you live an anonymous life online is either woefully naïve or very uneducated about how the Internet works.

Your online habits are being tracked almost everywhere you go nowadays. It is virtually impossible for someone, unless they're using a Virtual Private Network or the Tor Network, to do things online without leaving a digital paper trail.

This is where Bitcoin comes into play. The digital currency does change a lot of the rules surrounding how people pay for things online. That's undoubtedly true. Yet what it also does is further instill in people's minds that privacy and anonymity is something to be valued and even encouraged online. More to the point, the legitimacy of Bitcoin — and the application's inevitable software descendents — shows that some people aren't so keen on the Internet Age's latest idiom, Radical Transparency.

Even if Bitcoin fails today, the currency's mere existence means really big trouble for banks and governments tomorrow

I once read that governments are often a generation or two behind technology in both how they use an invention and drafting laws to govern an invention's use.

What makes Bitcoin so subversive is how it is both a radically new idea — no central governing body, no fees and no way to control the online transactions — and surprisingly old school: the currency obeys time-tested laws of economics that many governments, in the wake of the Western world's debt crisis, long-abandoned years ago.

Even if Bitcoin ultimately collapses under the strain of market forces, there's no doubt that it's set a new benchmark for how people conduct business online. More people, fed up with governments and banks, are going to gravitate to newer, ever-evolving services like Bitcoin. With no ability to harness the money, both governments and financial institutions are going to find it harder and harder to manage their money.

The recent banking crisis in Cyprus illustrates this point clearly: the value of Bitcoins rose sharply in recent weeks due to more and more people putting their wealth into the digital currency to avoid it being seized by banks.

Bitcoin will, in some ways, help accelerate the move to a paperless cash society

There's a certain irony in one aspect to Bitcoin's growing popularity. One of the great fears of a service like Bitcoin is how, given the anonymous nature of a transaction, it will cater to criminal behaviour online. That's undoubtedly true to some extent; many criminal actions are often conducted in ways that minimize a paper trail, like using hard currency or a service like Bitcoin.

Still, as more people get comfortable with using a service like Bitcoin (either legally or not), it's only going to foster more demand for digital payments. This will mean more merchants offering point-of-sale methods to buy something, either through Near-Field Communication (NEC) chips embedded in your smartphone or through Bitcoin-enabled apps.

The transition towards a paperless cash society is, at least in my opinion, largely inevitable, but making people comfortable with the idea of digital payments has to go beyond simply a debit card or Interac terminal. This is where Bitcoin comes in: it's going to make money, to borrow one Canadian bank's slogan, "more comfortable."

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