Money 3.0: How Bitcoins May Change the Global Economy
Despite shutdown of an illicit Internet marketplace, virtual currency blooms.
Invented in 2008, Bitcoin is not the first attempt at an all-digital, cryptographically based currency. Others have existed in one form or another for nearly fifty years, but have either failed to take off or dramatically crashed and burned. Bitcoin is the first cryptocurrency with the deep structure, wide adoption, and trading momentum to achieve escape velocity.
In practice, Bitcoin blends credit cards' ease of digital transfer with the relative anonymity of a cash handoff. Like all currencies, the problems it poses are both practical and metaphysical; like cash or credit, Bitcoin is somehow both more and less real than the goods it is traded for.
Until now, the most well-known of these goods have been illegal drugs, like those on Silk
