Bitcoin is sometimes called currency of the future, but that is true only to an extent. While technologically this sort of assumption makes total sense, it remains to be seen when all countries of the world are ready to grant bitcoin the status of legally recognized currency. In Germany bitcoin is a recognized unit of account, the US Treasury recently classified bitcoin as a commodity, and Canada installed bitcoin ATMs. Yet in other countries, such as Russia and Thailand, bitcoin is outlawed completely. Rickard Falkwinge, Swedish IT entrepreneur, recently predicted a surge of bitcoin popularity by 2019, citing several examples of an average 10-year period separating introduction of a technology from mass acceptance of its use, like file sharing (from 1989 to 1999), blogging (1994 to 2004) and video streaming (2004 to 2014).
