BITCOINS: Currency Of The Future?

There are lots of ways to make money: You can earn it, find it, or counterfeit it. Or, if you are Satoshi Nakamoto, you can create it. In November 2008, a mysterious entity going with the persona "Satoshi Nakamoto" published a research paper outlining his design for a new digital currency that he called bitcoin. None of the veterans had heard of him, and what little information could be gleaned was murky and contradictory. On his online profile, he said he is from Japan. His email address was from a German service, and Google searches for his name turned up no relevant information; it was clearly a pseudonym. But while Nakamoto himself may have been a puzzle, his creation cracked a problem that had stumped cryptographers for decades. 

Basically, Bitcoin is a decentralized protocol for online payments, like a digital currency designed to allow people to buy and sell without centralized control by banks or governments, and it allows for anonymous transactions which are not tied to a real identity. The problem with purely digital currencies is that of double-spending, and the usual solution is by assigning a trusted intermediary. Visa, MasterCard, and every other bank and payment processor make sure you cannot spend the same dollars twice by deducting them from your account before they get added to someone else’s account. However, the enigmatic creator specifically tried to avoid this centralized approach in the original Bitcoin design. His idea was to use cryptography to create verifiable transaction records without the need to trust anyone but your own calculations, immune to printing-press-happy central bankers and Weimar Republic-style hyperinflation. 

Although at the moment Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are far from being the only form of payment used universally, that should still not overshadow the fact that these currencies are rapidly growing in popularity and the day they finally take over is as far as we may think. One of the major obstacles in its part to dominance is the fact that these currency becoming completely digital can pose a huge threat of being hacked easily, perhaps more easily than physically stealing someone's wallet. Still, that's is something I feel the creators can find a remedy to as they continue to develop it. Although, some could still argue that the people determined to find the quickest way to riches can get immune to whatever comes their way. Eventually,  nothing is for certain and we will just have to wait and see.