Everyone everywhere is having problems with money, not enough of it, too much in the hands of the too few, heavily regulated and centralized and far too rigid for today's fast-paced and flexible lifestyles of a modern human being. What if there was a change in the air that could radically define early 21st century as a time where we took physical currency and turned it purely digital. like crypto-currency aka "nerd money".
Almost 40 years ago ARPNET invented TCP/IP that eventually took the shape of what we know now as the "World Wide Web", ever since then we've been digitally integrating everything with the cyber frontier known as the internet. Communication, entertainment, business, cats, porn, and now our own money is being digitized, well it has already been digitized before we've really been able to conceptualize the idea.
The idea that our currencies have some sort of "intrinsic" value like Gold or silver or oil is old fashioned and has been like this for decades before we even realized it, the US, for example, has its currency based purely on the federal reserve that basically means that the united states currency is based on nothing more than the faith and credit of the country's Government itself or commonly referred to as a "fiat" currency.
When you really think about it, the idea of currency being "valuable" is weird social construction, for thousands of years people have been using representations of value, is east Asia thousands of years ago ancient Chinese and Indians would use shells as a form of currency to barter and trade with, other cultures used bones, rocks, gems, glass, silver, copper, gold, diamonds etc. It's a simple idea that has been lost on modern people and that is, money as we know it doesn't really have value outside of the cultures we construct around it, If further example is needed we look no further than the prison system its almost common knowledge at this point that prisoners use cigarettes, food and other contraband as currency between themselves and due to it being such intrinsic behavior I think we can understand how something like cigarettes and other items can become valuable to become its own currency.
Bitcoin is a digital currency, what makes this special is that this particular currency actually works without a bank, credit agency or any third party needing to verify a transaction has taken place or that what is being used to pay for transactions hasn't been tampered with or already used, this problem with digital currency is called "Double Spend". Bitcoin solves this by allowing everyone on the bitcoin network to confirm the transaction as opposed to just the bank or a single party, the benefit to this besides unfettered access to your own funds and what to do with it but also no third party transaction fee's between banks or businesses and the only person you need to trust with your funds is yourself.
Everything we buy today must go through a 3rd party, for verification that a transaction took place and all of these services require a fee, Litecoin and other crypto-currencies like IOTA make the fees so small you hardly notice or like in IOTA's case completely removing fees altogether.
So Today is the first day of my blog series about Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies and the personal challenges I face with it, I've been looking into Cryptocurrencies for under a week now and so far I've met confusion and doubt about these cryptocurrencies from friends and family everything from just not understanding how exactly it's valuable to conspiracy theories and odd talking points about Bitcoin's more shady dealings with the black market (like it doesn't happen with every fiat on this planet). Safe to say lots of people are sceptical of this new wave of technology.