Happy birthday to Bitcoin! 10 years ago, Satoshi Nakamoto published a white paper for “a Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” which would “allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.” Just a few short months later, the Bitcoin network launched on 3 January 2009.
Bitcoin is the culmination of thousands of years in the evolution in money. It is durable, portable, divisible, uniform, and limited by design. Over the span of human history, money has taken the form of shells, salt, coins, banknotes, and fiat bills. While money serves a crucial role in facilitating trade and wealth creation in society, it has often suffered from hidden inflation, outright confiscation, or the exclusion of unpopular groups from the economy. In the 100 years, the inherent flaws in fiat paper money have been used by governments to fund wars, corruption, and cronyism through the hidden tax of inflation.
Bitcoin is the first credible alternative to fiat currency and offers real, sound money made for the information age. The decentralized nature of Bitcoin has revolutionary potential for both the global economic order and billions of people who suffer from lack of access to financial institutions and corrupt governments and corporations. The concept of a distributed ledger stored on the blockchain has applications well beyond money, with the promise of creating a durable and credible record of property ownership, which has the potential to transform how we record property deeds, corporate shares, insurance claims, business contracts, and many more applications.
After the basic concepts of Bitcoin and the blockchain were discovered in 2009-2013, Bitcoin and the blockchain space entered the infrastructure stage. We are now building the ecosystem of tools, vendors, and relationships to make Bitcoin as easy or easier to use than products of legacy financial institutions. Once a mature infrastructure is in place for cryptocurrencies, the stage will be set mass adoption. Billions of people will have the devices, services, and vendor networks to use Bitcoin for everyday transactions, meeting the final requirement for money: widespread acceptability.
The mass adoption of cryptocurrencies will not create a utopia – it is more likely to be hugely disruptive to the economic-political order. However, genuine sound money is what humanity desperately needs to build a harmonious, robust, and integrated global digital economy on the backbone of the Internet.
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