Bitcoin is the future of money.
Most people, including nearly all college students, have no clue what Bitcoin is, what the point of Bitcoin is and why people are obsessively excited about it. Even if you aren’t a crypto-anarchist, open-source programmer, you should be excited about Bitcoin’s implications.
Every day, more businesses are accepting bitcoin, and the big players are taking notice.
Last Tuesday, NASDAQ agreed to set up a trading platform for a Bitcoin startup called Noble Markets.
Computer science sophomore Grant Bourque is an avid Bitcoin enthusiast since the currency’s early days and programmer for a Bitcoin startup. He defined Bitcoin as a “decentralized digital currency, using peer-to-peer networking to establish an internet economy.”
That might make some do a double take, but this definition can be broken down pretty easily.
The running joke says bitcoin is “magic Internet money,” but that actually sums it up pretty well. Bourque said it’s essentially cash distributed using a protocol similar to BitTorrent. If you’ve ever used Square Cash, Apple Pay or paid somebody for Snapchat nudes through the app, then you’ve experienced something similar.
The advantage of Bitcoin is that it comes with its own currency. Currently, one bitcoin is worth about $240, and in the long-term, that price should rise due to its deflationary nature. If you don’t have that much to drop on internet currency speculation, don’t worry your hungover head, you can purchase .001 BTC for just a quarter.
You can’t buy everything with bitcoin, but you can buy a Dell computer, book a trip on Expedia or cop some dope Oakleys to frat strap for the bus trip.
If you don’t care much for the law, the pantheon of Internet drug dealers almost exclusively accept bitcoin due to its near-anonymity.
The question plaguing most people reading this probably isn’t “How can I get some of this glorified nerd money?” It’s more likely you’re thinking, “Why is this columnist wasting my time? I want to read something that’ll make me angry and cynical about the world.”
If you read Jay Cranford’s great piece about identity theft in The Daily Reveille last week and can’t stop thinking about just how many places you’ve swiped your credit card, bitcoin might be for you.
Even if somebody stole my credit card, social security number and learned my mother’s maiden name, they wouldn’t be able to touch my bitcoin holdings, just like cash.
The currency is also new. In fact, it’s probably younger than any one reading this column.
It started in 2009, which means the beginnings of a progressive millennial-focused financial system are just waiting to be adopted.
Bitcoin could be the first step to recreating the world in terms that dramatically deviate from the status quo. If young people of all stripes took up the currency, it could be the largest generational transfer of wealth in history.
However, this is only possible if everybody buys in. So ask yourself this question: do you prefer Wall Street executives or Silicon Valley nerds to be your economic overlords?
James Richards is a 20-year-old mass communication sophomore from New Orleans. You can reach him on Twitter @JayEllRichy.