Bitcoin Forum

Alice need not provide currency to Bob in-person. She may instead transfer this value by first entrusting her currency to a bank who promises to store and protect Alice's currency notes. The bank gives Alice a written promise (called a "bank statement") that entitles her to withdraw the same number of currency bills that she deposited. Since the money is still Alice's, she is entitled to do with it whatever she pleases, and the bank (like most banks), for a small fee, will do Alice the service of passing on the currency bills to Bob on her behalf. This is done by Alice's bank by giving the dollar bills to Bob's bank and informing them that the money is for Bob, who will then see the amount the next time he checks his balance or receives his bank statement.

Since banks have many customers, and bank employees require money for doing the job of talking to people and signing documents, banks in recent times have been using machines such as ATMs and web servers that do the job of interacting with customers instead of paid bank employees. The task of these machines is to learn what each customer wants to do with their money and, to the extent that it is possible, act on what the customer wants (for example, ATMs can hand out cash). Customers can always know how much money they have in their accounts, and they are confident that the numbers they see in their bank statements and on their computer screens accurately reflect the number of dollars that they can get from the bank on demand. They can be so sure of this that they can accept those numbers in the same way they accept paper banknotes (this is similar to the way people started accepting paper dollars when they had been accepting gold or silver).

Such a system has several disadvantages:

It is costly. EFTs in Europe can cost 25 euros. Credit transactions can cost several percent of the transaction.
It is slow. Checking and low cost wire services take days to complete.
In most cases, it cannot be anonymous.
Accounts can be frozen, or their balance partially or wholly confiscated.
Banks and other payment processors like PayPal, Visa, and Mastercard may refuse to process payments for certain legal entities.

Bitcoin is a system of owning and voluntarily transferring amounts of so-called bitcoins, in a manner similar to an on-line banking, but pseudonymously and without reliance on a central authority to maintain account balances. If bitcoins are valuable, it is because they are useful and limited in supply.