The post Bitcoin Is Cash For The Internet appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

Bitcoin is much more than a typical online payment system. After all, we have plenty of those: PayPal, Venmo, and the like. Bitcoin and other privately used cryptocurrencies are cash for the internet. Paper cash is an almost perfect way to pay someone. You don’t need an account. It doesn’t care who you are or what you’re buying. It’s a bearer instrument. I hand you a dollar. Now you have the dollar and I don’t. It’s instant and no one can interfere with the transaction. There is no trusting someone else to make sure the dollar gets to you. And best of all, it’s private. There is no record of that transaction whatsoever. It’s so private that there is an old joke in the cryptocurrency community: If cash were to be invented today, it would be illegal. For all its benefits, however, paper cash is useless online. To pay someone over the internet, we have come to rely on a system of intermediaries to keep money moving. We put our money in a bank, direct that bank to send money to a company like PayPal, ask PayPal to send the money to another user’s PayPal account, they then finally have to withdraw from PayPal to a bank account from which they could choose to withdraw cash. Every step in this process is recorded in detail by each involved company and ultimately reported to the government. And we have to rely on the companies to voluntarily execute our transaction, something which history has shown should not be taken for granted. Unfortunately paper cash is dying as people opt for the convenience of tools like Venmo. Even face-to-face transactions for coffee that would have once been handled with paper cash are now intermediated, that is, recorded, reported, and executed under the rules…

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Filed under: News - @ July 24, 2024 3:22 pm