What if there is a technological program that exist that's so powerful that it transforms the very basic fundamentals of our society? A technology which fundamentally influences the economy, governance system and businesses function and could change the conceptual understanding of trading, ownership and trust. The technology existed already and it's called Cryptocurrency.
Bitcoin is only seen by people as a digital tool for or used as payment for transactions. However, looking more would make us realize that there is more beneath it. Simply because bitcoin became famous because of its undeniably expensive price and it uses.
1. Trading
Money exist to facilitate trade. Centuries has passed and trading become even more complicated. Everyone trades with everyone worldwide. Trade is recorded in bookkeeping. And this information is often isolated and close to the public. For this reason, we use third parties and middle men we trust to facilitate and approve our transactions.
Kinds of trusted third parties
Governments
Banks
Accountants
Lotteries
Paper money in our wallet
And this is where bitcoin shines.
Bitcoin software enables a network of computers to maintain a collective bookkeeping via the internet. Bookkeeping is uncontrollable by anyone because this is available to the public in a single digital ledger that distributed in the network - and called Blockchain. (You can refer to my article about Blockchain).
In the Blockchain all transactions are locked including information on the time, date, participants and amount of every single transaction. Nodes owned a blockchain's whole copy in the network.
Miners
Base on this complex principles of mathematical process, the Bitcoin miners is the one to verify each transactions in the network for the ledger to be maintained. The principles also makes sure that every nodes are automatically and continuing to agree about what's happening in the ledger and to the transactions. If someone tried to manipulate the transaction, nodes will be cancelled and disallow to function in the blockchain.
Transactions are public and lots of nodes agrees that a transactions has happened on that time and date.
Ledger
The ledger doesn't care whether a Bitcoin represents a certain amount of Dollars or Euros or anything else that value or property for that matter. Everyone can decide how will they buy bitcoin.
A Bitcoin a divisible in a hundred million units. Bitcoin units are programmable and identifiable. This means that the users can program a properties to every unit.
They can program it to represents:
Euro cent
Share in a company
Kilowatt hour of energy
or Digital certificate of ownership.
That says that bitcoin is more than just a money for transaction payments.
Bitcoin can also represents many kinds of properties like:
thousand dose of oil
credits
or a vote during elections
More of it, bitcoin can also make us to make our cash and money flows automize and smarter.
Imagine a health care allowance in dollars or Euros that can only be use to pay for health care at certified parties. In this case, whether someone actually follows rules is no longer verified in the Bureau of credit process afterwards. You just apply a program rule in to the currency.
Programmable open bitcoin
Allows us to completely rebuild and innovate our financial sector under administrative processes to make it more transparent, efficient and significantly decrease pirocracy.
In the world of internet, lots of machines will be launched to join the traffic of economy. In fact, it already exists.
Example:
A drones that delivers packages or a vending machine.
These machines are unfamiliar with the concept of trust but Bitcoin does not.
Because of bitcoin, the drone can be a hundred percent certain to deliver the package to the reciever and know for sure that it's been paid for. And we can program the vending machine in such a way that it can automatically keep track of its supplies, order new supplies to its supplier and pay for them automatically.
Of course you'll understand that this is just the beginning. Internet technology is disruptive and break the status quo. It will show the market and outrun the middle man all the time.
Conclusion
Cryptocurrencies made a lot of impacts to economy. We should study and explore deeper in this technology critically and discuss potential applicative methods.
Image sources:
Lead Image : Crypto Currency
Image 1 : Trading
Image 2 : Miners
Because of bitcoin, the drone can be a hundred percent certain to deliver the package to the reciever and know for sure that it's been paid for. And we can program the vending machine in such a way that it can automatically keep track of its supplies, order new supplies to its supplier and pay for them automatically.
Of course you'll understand that this is just the beginning. Internet technology is disruptive and break the status quo. It will show the market and outrun the middle man all the time.