Bitcoin Forum

When cows were used as a medium of exchange, nobody called it “biocurrency.” In the cultures that traded seashells to escape the inefficiency of barter, they didn’t call it “calcicurrency.” It was just money.

New forms of money such as bitcoin are exciting for their technical underpinnings, but we might not want to make them more forbidding by calling them “cryptocurrency.” Cryptography is an important part of many digital currencies’ administration, and it is central to bitcoin, but at their core they are all just money.

The choice is not whether to have digital currencies. The choice is between adopting digital currencies the hard way or the easy way. The hard way is trying to outlaw banking, payments, and other financial services denominated in new currencies. The easy way is embracing them, making them part of mainstream financial systems, and accepting the greater liberty, power, and privacy they accord to individuals.