How Bitcoin Could change Everything

Everybody is constantly thinking about ways to make money. The average American spends more hours of each day attempting to earn it than he does anything else– be that eating, playing or even sleeping.

But hardly a soul – not even highbrow economists – stops to consider what money actually is and how it works. It is hard to overstate how important money is. Like the air we breathe, it is part of almost everything we do. Just about every transaction we make involves money. To use another analogy, what blood is to a body, money is to an economy.

Governments, central banks and private banks create modern money – dollars, pounds, euros and so on. This ability to create money is – as I’m sure you appreciate – an immensely powerful privilege. While most have treated this privilege responsibly most of the time, there are plenty that haven’t. And all sorts of abuses have crept in.

Politicians are forever spending more money than they have – aka running up deficits – in pursuit of some ideology or political agenda (normally popularity and re-election). They might spend the money on bailing out banks, on welfare, on some kind of subsidy; they might even spend it on wars (the US military is the world’s biggest employer). 

Central banks manipulate interest rates and inflation numbers on behalf of politicians and special interest groups. Private banks, through such means as lending and leverage, perpetrate their own abuses in pursuit of profit. As a result of all this, money gets debased.

Government agencies even use money as a means to control people and spy on them. Money is supposed to be a means of exchange and a store of wealth, but it is also a political tool. This has been the case throughout history, but the control of governments and banks has grown over the last hundred years and is now unprecedented. It has led to huge concentrations of wealth and power. Both the state and finance now occupy, in the eyes of many, disproportionate territory in our economies.

Meanwhile, over half the world’s population still doesn’t have access to basic financial services and is shut out. Suddenly, along comes Bitcoin, an open-source currency with no central authority, offering an alternative that could undermine the existing monetary order. 

Nobody even knows who designed it. It’s by no means the first attempt at digital cash, but it’s the first that works this well. It’s actually more efficient than dollars or pounds. It’s immune to all the manipulation and abuses that go on, there are no barriers to entry, bar internet access, and it has captured a zeitgeist in a way that nobody could have foreseen.

If Bitcoin changes the way we transact and the way we store wealth – and it has the potential to do this – the repercussions could be enormous. Think what email did to the postal service, or what the internet did to newspapers, publishing, music and television. With the huge costs involved in the printing and distribution of physical newspapers, news publishing was once the exclusive domain of a few large companies. 

Now any blogger, aspiring journalist or start-up can publish on the web, effectively for free. Huge opportunities have opened up to the masses, and the old dinosaurs have seen their monopolies eroded.

We’re still a long way from that, but Bitcoin could do something similar to banking, finance and, even, the large state model under which we live. Without wishing to get too excited, it could bring about the huge changes to society so many are clamouring for, re-balancing the skewed distribution of wealth and opportunity. The implications are enormous.

That’s why Bitcoin is important.


Read More: How to Get Bitcoin Fast