The Age of Cryptocurrency summary

The number of Bitcoin supporters is growing every day, but many people still have a hard time viewing it as “real” because you can’t see or touch individual Bitcoins. Bitcoin has already proved itself to be a viable currency, however.

Bitcoin functions as money because people trust that it has value – just like “normal” money. When people started to see that real things could be bought using it, trust increased.

You can’t create gold at home – you have to work hard finding it and mining it. Bitcoin works in a similar way. Instead of pickaxes, however, Bitcoins are mined with computers.

Computers mine Bitcoins by solving highly complex mathematical problems.

Every time you swipe your credit card or transfer money, banks and credit card companies skim a bit off the top. Wouldn’t it be great to get rid of this?

Bitcoin does. It removes the middleman and makes transactions cheaper and more efficient.

Bitcoin has only been around a few years, but the number of Bitcoin believers has grown quite rapidly. All across the globe, people are devoting themselves to Bitcoin. It’s becoming very profitable to do so.

Huge amounts of money are now invested in Bitcoin mining every year. According to one estimate, over $1 billion was spent on building “rigs” of super-fast computers designed specifically for mining Bitcoins between April 2013 and April 2014.

There are about 2.5 billion people worldwide who don’t have money in banks. They lack many of the freedoms people in developing countries take for granted. Bitcoin could change all this.

Bitcoin can give people in developing countries more economic freedom. Fatima, a mother of five who lives in a refugee camp in Mali is an example of this.

So, given all these benefits, what are the downsides of Bitcoin?

Bitcoin software is still far from bulletproof, which means that its price is very volatile.