Bitcoin is still very much in its infancy. When most people think of Bitcoin today, they remember the salacious news stories of hackers making off with millions of dollars, or the hugely volatile currency that seems to have been created from nowhere. It’s not necessarily thought of as secure and so it’s quite understandable that many are skeptical and even critical of its future potential. However, what most miss in the discussion is just what Bitcoin really is at its core, which is the first true money humankind has ever invented — and one that is programmable, so it can be built into everything.
Why do I say this? Well, from the very beginning of time, humans have traded goods with one another, and have used money as proxies for these goods, as a simpler form of exchange. That money has taken the form of gold and silver, sea shells, promissory notes and state-issued legal currency, to name but a few. In all these cases the money has been forged, cheated, stolen and its value decimated by inflationary tactics. Kings did it to pay off war debt, people clipped bits of gold coins, weighing scales were tampered with, the Federal Reserve was invented to control it, etc. There is not a single instance — until Bitcoin — of a truly trustworthy form of money, one whose value was constrained not by the laws and weaknesses of man, but by the universal laws of mathematics.
