Blockchain makes finances faster, cheaper and more inclusive than traditional banks.

Here’s a question that doesn’t require a supercomputer to answer: Which would arrive first on a journey from the United States to China, an anvil being sent through the mail or a ten dollar bill being sent by a bank?

Believe it or not, the anvil would get there first. And this is part of the problem with today’s financial system. Banks are just unnecessarily complicated and slow; in fact, many of them are still using mainframe computers from the 1970s!

Since we do a lot of online banking already, you’d think money would be able to travel as fast as an email, but the system is bogged down by a ridiculously large number of middlemen.

These middlemen not only slow things down; they make things more expensive in an effort to boost their own bank accounts.

Middlemen include credit card companies, investment banks, stock exchanges, wire services like Western Union, accounting and security firms and so on.

But none of this is necessary for a currency that uses blockchain, which is how Bitcoin operates.

Bitcoins take around 10 minutes to be transferred from one account to another, which is all the time it takes to add a new block to the chain. So there’s no need to pass through five different intermediaries, which is what happens when you use a credit card to pay for a cup of coffee at Starbucks.

The complex and expensive way banks operate also makes them essentially useless for the poorest populations.

Due to the complicated banking system, payments under 20 cents aren’t profitable for banks, even though 2.2 billion people live on less than a dollar a day. It’s no wonder that 2.5 billion people don’t have a bank account.

Blockchain, on the other hand, could make for a great alternative since it handles small payments and provides many of a bank’s services at no cost.

Anyone with an internet connection can use blockchain and join the global economy.