There are two properties of cryptocurrency. They are:
1. Transactional and
2. Monetary.
1: TRANSACTIONAL
– Irreversible: After confirmation, a transaction can‘t be reversed. By nobody. And nobody means nobody. Not you, not your bank, not the president of the United States, not Satoshi, not your miner. Nobody. If you send money, you send it. Period. No one can help you. If you send your funds to a scammer or if a hacker stole them from your computer. There is no safety net.
– Pseudonymous: Neither transactions nor accounts are connected to real-world identities. You receive Bitcoins on so-called addresses, which are randomly seeming chains of around 30 characters.
While it is usually possible to analyze the transaction flow, it is not necessarily possible to connect the real-world identity of users with those addresses.
– Fast and global: Transactions are propagated nearly instantly in the network and are confirmed in a couple of minutes. Since they happen in a global network of computers, they are completely indifferent to your physical location.
It doesn‘t matter if I send Bitcoin to my neighbor or to someone on the other side of the world.
– Secure: Cryptocurrency funds are locked in a public key cryptography system.
Only the owner of the private key can send cryptocurrency. Strong cryptography and the magic of big numbers make it impossible to break this scheme. A Bitcoin address is more secure than Fort Knox
– Permissionless: You don‘t have to ask anybody to use cryptocurrency. It‘s just a software that everybody can download for free. After you installed it, you can receive and send Bitcoins or other cryptocurrencies. No one can prevent you. There is no gatekeeper.
2: MONETARY
– Controlled supply: Most cryptocurrencies limit the supply of the tokens. In Bitcoin, the supply decreases in time (Halving) and will reach its final number sometime around the year 2140. All cryptocurrencies control the supply of the token by a schedule written in the code.
– No debt but bearer: The Fiat-money on your bank account is created by debt, and the numbers you see on your ledger represent nothing but debts. It‘s a system of IOU. Cryptocurrencies don‘t represent debts, they just represent themselves.
To understand the revolutionary impact of Cryptocurrencies, you need to consider both properties. Bitcoin as a permissionless, irreversible, and pseudonymous means of payment is an attack on the control of banks and governments over the monetary transactions of their citizens.
You can‘t hinder someone to use Bitcoin. You can‘t prohibit someone to accept a payment. You can‘t undo a transaction
