Bitcoins and cyber money

At the risk of sounding boring, everything started with the barter system, whereby people producing more of a product than they needed to consume, swapped their goods for scantier supplies.

As such a system became highly inefficient, human beings back then decided to utilize an exchangeable material. Precious metals were the natural choice, gold being the one that eventually stood out and remained generally accepted.

There were, essentially, two problems with gold: firstly, the complexity of carrying and storing it, and secondly the lack of a large enough amount to support the increasing global trade. An initial attempt to curtail the first problem saw the production of portable amounts of gold; those were the first coins in circulation.

With gold prone to being stowed beneath the watchful eye of security companies (the banks of today), and it not going unnoticed that clients almost never withdrew their money simultaneously, governments began to issue money not entirely backed up by gold. Since then, money has had no real value apart from the confidence on the issuing nation.

Along with the spread of the internet, diverse sites, - trying to ease their costumers into consuming products and services, - started to exchange real funds for a kind of money (or credit) that is accepted only on the internet site itself. Today this prevails as a currency exchangeable between internet users of fun-and-games webs.

Bitcoins, on the other hand, stand as a completely different option. Painstakingly created by an anonymous entrepreneur, bitcoins are mined through computers. Being legal, but extremely intricate to put anyone’s computer to work creating bitcoins, the appeal lies on the fact that whoever can exchange real money for bitcoins, can anonymously spend them. Although they are basically used as another option for gambling, the number of companies accepting bitcoins is rising.

Does that represent the beginning of the end for traditional money? It doesn't seem so, mainly because of the difficulty to comprehend the mining procedure. Nonetheless, it's quite likely that they've opened the door to a new economic reality: accepted money flowing far from government control.