When Satoshi Nakamoto published a paper in October 2008, describing his creation - an electronic cash system peer-to-peer -, few gave him attention. Even the encryption experts believed that the project had any chance of success.
The idea of a digital money was not new; some had tried to develop a currency for the Internet age, but no initiative had managed to take off.
Just over six years ago, when the network started to be built by a handful of volunteer programmers, no one could imagine that today the Bitcoin reach the status of largest distributed computing project in the world, with computing power that exceeds by more than 200 times the capacity of 500 global supercomputers combined.
Nor could predict that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) form a research department dedicated exclusively to cryptocurrency tacitly recognizing the innovative technology of Bitcoin as a new and legitimate field of scientific knowledge.
In 2009, one of the digital currency unit did not even have a price. At the time, it would be a complete reverie expect the Bank of England deemed relevant - if not transformative - the implications of the Bitcoin protocol on state money and the traditional banking system. Consider, moreover, the possibility of a central bank issuing its own digital currency would be pure fantasy.
What once might seem illusion of an ambitious computer project is now reality. Digital currency inspired creative solutions to the economic debacle of Greece. While Bitcoin is not a solution to the fiscal trouble the country's government, he served as a genuine refuge for the Greek people, unable to transfer money abroad and hostage of a possible confiscation or return to the old drachma.
Dell's caliber companies and Microsoft accept bitcoins as payment. Consultancies like Deloitte test the use of blockchain - the great "book-accounting" Bitcoin - to audit processes. The Honduran government is studying a pilot project to register land ownership in blockchain.
The Nasdaq is experiencing infrastructure technology to record transactions and ownership of securities. The New York Stock Exchange, in turn, invests in one of the largest processors of payment Bitcoin. SWIFT already offered recently a grant of 15,000 euros to the best research paper on the impact and potential of blockchain technology for transactions of assets.
Each week, new companies seek to exploit the possibilities of Bitcoin, endorsing and legitimizing increasingly this great technological innovation.
But what is this technology, after all? The Bitcoin is a revolutionary invention of computer science. In essence, however, it is nothing more than a protocol, a set of rules by which communicate computers connected to the peer-to-peer network system. There is no central server monitoring compliance. First, because they encourage honest behavior; second, because all are monitored by all. Trust and security are achieved in a decentralized manner, thanks to the ingenious use of modern cryptography, and without having to know the identity of the participants.
The extraordinary feat - and unprecedented in computing era - is that this protocol allowed recreate the scarcity of the physical world in the digital world. A bitcoin is a digital asset that can not be reproduced or falsified; their property ownership is duly registered in blockchain.
The innovative technology has allowed recreate the characteristics of physical money in the digital world. But with a remarkable peculiarity, because Bitcoin is both a digital currency and payment system. This never happened in financial history. Admittedly, it is not recognized or issued by any state. foreign currency, by definition, never will be. But it has functioned as money for many people, something inexplicable to most economists, whose theories do not admit one produced currency freely by the market.
It has finite supply and is no one's liability, similar to the precious metals. We can classify it as a commodity, but a digital nature. The first digital commodity story. An active bearer that can be guarded and transferred without relying on any intermediary. An active really unprecedented.
But the electronic money is only the most visible part is the obvious application, as was the e-mail to the Internet. Because, after all, Bitcoin is merely a technology property title registers which has a book-book virtually unchanged - once made the record, it is computationally infeasible to reverse it.
This invention has value, has utility, and nothing prevents the blockchain be used to record other assets not bitcoins. The truth is that the technology is much more than just money to the internet. Potentially, the Internet is money. It is the Internet applied to finance.
In fact, we are not facing a simple smartphone application. Nor is it a bubble of digital tulips. In fact, Bitcoin is arguably the most important invention since the Internet, and the implications of this technology are not predictable or imaginable whole. But we can not debunk it, because it has the potential to cause disruption in various industries.
The Bitcoin is an evolution of the Internet itself. It is also an evolution of money as we know it. And just as the Internet has transformed the exchange of information around the world, the invention of Satoshi Nakamoto has the potential to transform the exchange value.
