Category Archive: decentralization

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The Role of Bitcoin in Building a Decentralized Financial System

Bitcoin, the world’s first and most widely-used decentralized digital currency, has an important role in building a decentralized financial system. One of the key advantages of Bitcoin is its potential for appreciating in value, thanks to its limited and predetermined supply. This can make it a potentially attractive investment, as it may increase in value over time.

In addition to its potential for growth, Bitcoin offers security and transparency through its distributed ledger, the blockchain. This means that transactions on the network are almost impossible to cheat or make fraudulent, making it a secure option for conducting financial transactions.

Bitcoin’s decentralized nature also means that it is not subject to the same risks as traditional currencies, such as inflation or government seizure. This makes it a useful option for individuals in countries with unstable currencies or high inflation rates, as it allows them to store value and make payments in a more stable and secure way.

The rise of DeFi, or decentralized finance, has also seen the development of a number of projects built on top of the Bitcoin network. These include RSK and tBTC, which allow users to access a wide range of financial services in a decentralized and trustless manner.

The Lightning Network, another layer built on top of the Bitcoin network, also offers users the ability to make fast and cheap transactions. This can make transactions faster and cheaper, and can also enable new use cases such as micropayments and instant payments. One such wallet that integrates with the Lightning Network is HolyTransaction, which offers a wide range of digital assets and other benefits such as an easy-to-use interface and fast and cheap transactions.

A leading project is Blockstream’s Liquid Bitcoin, also known as L-BTC. Liquid Bitcoin is a sidechain-based token that is pegged to the value of Bitcoin, allowing users to transfer value between the two networks quickly and securely. The Liquid Network is a federated sidechain that uses a consortium of trusted nodes to provide increased privacy and security for users.

Another project that leverages the Liquid Network is Fuji Money, a Lightning-enabled non-custodial synthetic asset protocol. Fuji Money allows users to create and trade synthetic assets, such as stablecoins or synthetic commodities, on the Liquid Network in a trustless and decentralized manner. This allows users to access a wider range of financial instruments and services, further expanding the capabilities of the decentralized financial system.

Overall, the role of Bitcoin in building a decentralized financial system is significant, thanks to its potential for appreciation in value, security and transparency, and ability to provide financial inclusion.

Open your free digital wallet here to store your cryptocurrencies in a safe place.

Satoshi
storj logo

Wallet Storj: STORJ token joins HolyTransaction

As of today, you can instantly purchase Storj on HolyTransaction, transfer them to any HolyTransaction’s customer for free, and do crypto-to-crypto swaps between your Wallet Storj and more than other 30 cryptocurrencies.

The Storj project provides for a decentralized cloud storage facility and is originally pronounced as “storage“.

Storj’s main aim is to rent a space on the secondary storage devices of the members of its network and pay them in cryptocurrency, for their service they provide. Therefore, Storj’s native cryptocurrency token is STORJ, which can be stored on HolyTransaction now.

“The main difference between Storj and other decentralized cloud storage platforms is that Storj only uses blockchain to manage payments and not to store data. This is due to the high cost and slow speeds found in blockchains. For example, even the fastest blockchains process data/payments in seconds. Meanwhile, traditional cloud storage solutions, like Amazon S3, can store files in milliseconds – many orders of magnitude faster than even the fastest blockchains.”

Shawn Wilkinson (Founder of Storj)

The Storj platform offers online storage similar to Dropbox or Google Drive, but does so over a distributed network. Renting out unused extra space on our hard drives is referred to as, Farming, for instance. The process as simple as downloading a client from the network, choosing the amount of space to be rented, and a wallet address to store the incentives received in the form of cryptocurrency.

All HolyTransaction customers can create a new address for STORJ and use the simple HolyTransaction Web Wallet to send and receive transactions or to instantly convert them to any other cryptocurrency.

Just like with Bitcoin, you can:

  • Send STORJ to any address, even to addresses of other cryptocurrencies with instant conversion on the fly;
  • Receive transactions;
  • Exchange STORJ with any supported coins;
  • Make instant transactions between HT users;
  • Get real time exchange rates on the website;
  • Set OTP for additional protection.

To add Wallet Storj just click on the “plus” button you find at the top right of the balance page, once you successfully enter into your wallet.

You can find the “plus” button to select the wallets you want to see in the main page like shown in the picture below:

Add new cryptocurrency

We’re excited to be part of the STORJ community!

NOTE: Our multicurrency wallet can store more than 30 cryptocurrencies, including: Bitcoin, Dash, Ethereum, DogecoinLitecoin, DecredZcash, Dai Stablecoin, DigixDao, Augur, 0x Project, Gamecredits, Enjin CoinBlackcoin, Gridcoin, Aidcoin, PeercoinSyscoin, Groestlcoin, Power Ledger, BAT, BlockVPIVXTrueUSD, Cardano, and STORJ among the others.

Open your free digital wallet here to store your cryptocurrencies in a safe place.

Satoshi
Untitled design 14

You can’t leash the DOGE

Dogecoin, Holytransaction

When ideas and community purpose matter more than the last fin-tech innovation.

Dogecoin is a cryptocurrency, a form of digital money that like bitcoin, enables peer-to-peer transactions across a decentralized network.

If you’ve spent any time on the internet during the last decade, you shall have heard of the Doge meme: the iconic Shibe, barking comic sans quote like, “so scare,” “much noble,” “wow.”

At the peak of the meme’s popularity near the tail end of 2013, Palmer, an Australian marketer for one of the world’s largest tech companies, made a joke combining two of the internet’s most talked-about topics: cryptocurrency and Doge.

It was a joke taking aim at the bizarre world of crypto and at the recent coin-naming hype.

“Investing in Dogecoin,” Palmer tweeted, “pretty sure it’s the next big thing.”

And the tweet got a lot of attention. 

So the joke became a true play.

He bought the Dogecoin.com domain and uploaded a photoshopped Shibe on a coin. Adding a note on the site: If you want to make Dogecoin a reality, get in touch.

And this is just the tip. So, If you are interested in knowing the greatest detail of Dogecoin history, we bet you’ll like this article by Alex Moskov published at CoinCentral.com

Open your free digital wallet here to store your cryptocurrencies in a safe place.

Jack
creative

Creativecoin Wallet: HolyTransaction adds CREA


Do you want to open a Creativecoin wallet?

You are in the right place, as we at HolyTransaction decided to add this cryptocurrency among the 17 crypto available on our multicurrency wallet.

So, from now on you can store Creativecoin on Holytransaction, transfer them to any other wallet, and make crypto-to-crypto transfers from/to Creativecoin, and ten more cryptocurrency’s networks.

All HolyTransaction customers can create a new address for their own CREA Wallet and use the user-friendly HolyTransaction Wallet platform to send and receive transactions or to instantly convert them to any other cryptocurrency we currently support.

Creativecoin Wallet features

Just like Bitcoin and all the other supported digital currencies, you can now:

  • Send Creativecoin to any address, even to addresses of other cryptocurrencies with instant conversion on the fly;
  • Receive transactions;
  • Exchange Creativecoin with any supported coins;
  • Make instant transactions between HT users;
  • Get real time exchange rates on the website;
  • Set OTP for additional protection.

If you are not able to see your newest Creativecoin Wallet, you just need to click on the “plus” button on the top right of the balance page, once you successfully login into your own wallet.

What is Creativecoin?

Creativechain has created its own coin called Creativecoin (CREA), the first cryptocurrency designed to meet the needs of all creative communities that produce and distribute digital content.

Creativechain is a decentralized platform for the registration and distribution of multimedia content that proves in an indelible way the authorship and license of any work or creation.

Imagine a social network of content exchange like Facebook, Spotify or Youtube totally decentralized, without managers or intermediaries, without censorship and with its own P2P system of electronic money based on its own cryptocurrency.

The technological innovative proposal of this platform also directly challenges the centralized power of traditional systems of copyright management entities.

The platform applies the power of attorney of blockchain technology to create incorruptible timestamps that certify the authorship of any digital work such as photos, videos, films, texts, electronic books, software or any digitizable file. Creativechain is presented as a public and transparent alternative of intellectual property registration according to the new times, in which there are so much cultural production circulating on the internet.

Blockchain technology opens up a universe of possibilities for the registration and distribution of intellectual property without intermediaries. The power of attorney along with the decentralized p2p distribution of digital content create a new paradigm shift in the era of digital culture.

So, do you want to open your CREA wallet? Click here.

Open your free digital wallet here to store your cryptocurrencies in a safe place.

Satoshi
bitcoin in russia

Russian Blockchain to improve national payments

Today we want to talk about the recent Russian Blockchain interest and the country major announcements related to bitcoin and the distributed ledger.

According to Economic Times, Russia wants to use the blockchain technology to improve its national payment system and to simplify clients’ identification.

The Association of Financial Innovation (AFI) in Russia, in fact, prepared a draft for improving the regulation of its own national payment system.

This draft has been shared for a first discussion on the Association’s official web site. After this discussion, the roadmap will be presented to the Russian Duma, the Ministry of finance and the Bank of Russia.

According to the official article, the roadmap includes the use of the distributed ledger technology for users identification. Here an extract:

“Along with expansion opportunities in the short term transactions under the simplified identification of clients, develop an approach and implement a single identifier (possibly using blockchain technology)”.

The Association for Financial Technologies Development (FinTech Association) was recently setted up by the Bank of Russia.

Its participants will study and test the most promising technologies, including the distributed ledger, open application program interface (open API) and remote identification technologies. Also, the association will create a single payment space both for households and legal entities.

Russian Blockchain Interest

Earlier in 2016, the Bank of Russia revealed its technical prototype for financial messaging, based on the blockchain and called Masterchain.

This tool would allow instant confirmation of data; also it would create a few financial opportunities for the market participants to provide game-changing products and services to their clients.

Recenlty Russia seems to love the Blockchain very much. In fact, the national tax authority recognized Bitcoin as a foreign money, expressing the legality of Bitcoin use and transactions.

Also, Siberia Airlines revealed its use of the Ethereum Blockchain Smart Contract in a few transations.

To read more about Russian Blockchain projects, click here.

Open your free digital wallet here to store your cryptocurrencies in a safe place.

Amelia Tomasicchio
algorithmes

‘We’re All in on Blockchain’, says IBM

We are all in on Blockchain”: these were the words of IBM Director John Wolpert during the today Blockchain Conference in San Francisco. According to Wolpert the blockchain needs a more collaborative approach, which is not always guaranteed by the blockchain developers.

 

 

So it seems that the worldwide company IBM wants to ensure itself a leading role in the market solutions related to the blockchain.

 

In fact, IBM is working on the Hyperledger Project, an open-source blockchain led by The Linux Foundation. Presented in December, this project stars thirty companies including ABN Amro, CME Group, Red Hat and several blockchain startups.
“It’s amazing how many smart and genius people are behind bitcoin, but they miss some logic here. You don’t need to go from trusted to trustless on everything. I think that’s an honest disagreement. The Internet is a permissioned walled garden. Anyone heard of ICAAN [Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers]? It’s permissive, but it’s permissioned”, said Wolpert.
Hyperledger Project’s goal, he continued, is to be an evolution of the first generation projects such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, that gather all the best projects that leverage on the blockchain together with all the stakeholders that will potentially use such technology. This is necessary if we want to have a widely used transactional protocol.
It has to be immutable and modular. It can’t be this is the consensus algorithm, this is the token, all of that has to be modular. It has to be scalable. Interledger-ing is important. You have to inter-op between chains and different things”, he said.
During his speech Wolpert also emphasized IBM’s experience in consensus algorithms and distributed computing during the last 30 years.
It’s thanks to such experience that IBM was able to conduct the Hyperledger Project, that Wolpert sees as the only way to bring all the different stakeholders to the same table and make them work together to build and open-source blockchain platform that can be used in many different areas, as it is for Linux.
We’ve been doing projects on every kind of blockchain. We’ve been doing that for a couple years and now we have a whole unit. We announced [we worked with] the Linux Foundation […] At that point, we went all in on blockchain”.About the author: Amelia Tomasicchio is a writer and a journalist of Bitcoin-related news and articles. She started writing about Bitcoin in 2014 and she graduated in Rome with an essay about movie industry related to Bitcoin.

Open your free digital wallet here to store your cryptocurrencies in a safe place.

Amelia Tomasicchio

HolyTransaction’s Bitcoin Monthly Roundup of January 2016

Welcome to HolyTransaction’s first monthly recap for the new year of 2016. This past month of January has been marked by all time highs for the year thus far; during that time, the bitcoin price rose from a high of $430.89 on January 1st to a low of $368.49 on January 31st, according to Bitcoin exchange Bitstamp.



Since the news broke about Cryptsy’s disappearence, the exchange has officially put forward their side of the story. Paul Vernon claims that the exchange was hacked years ago, and admits to running a fractional reserve since that date. He even offered a 100 BTC reward for whoever could find the hacker. Community speculation and the piling legal documents against Cryptsy’s founder spell more bad news for the American exchange.



Months ago, Hearn was promoting Bitcoin XT, a hardfork that would have increased the Bitcoin blockchain block size in a brute force manner. The plan wasn’t able to garner community support, and Hearn eventually signed a deal to work with R3. Hearn also cited concerns about “Chinese miners” and the Great Firewall of China and what their involvement in Bitcoin meant for the longevity of the project. He left the Bitcoin community with a strong blog post on Medium, saying: “But despite knowing that Bitcoin could fail all along, the now inescapable conclusion that it has failed still saddens me greatly.” Unfortunately, many in the mainstream media took this as an opportunity to hail the death of Bitcoin; but alas, the death of Bitcoin was (again) greatly exaggerated.



Shaun Bridges, one of the government agents arrested and charged in the aftermath of the Silk Road case, which the agents were instrumental in, has been re-arrested. Bridges was found with packs of packed clothes, money, passports, and other evidence that he was planning to leave the country instead of reporting for his time in jail. There is evidence that Bridges still has Bitcoin stashed elsewhere, and the plot continues to thicken.



In a response to community outcry for better communication from those entrusted with the “original” version of Bitcoin, the Bitcoin Core team launched their social media presence this past month. They are also using popular communications platform Slack to better interface with the community. Interested users can signup at slack.bitcoincore.org to chat about the future of Bitcoin.



Former JP Morgan Chase banker Blythe Masters’ blockchain company, Digital Asset Holdings, has successfully raised $52 million for their project. The company previously bought out such bitcoin startups as Hyperledger and had been raising money through 2015 to bring the blockchain to the mainstream. The company also landed a deal with ASX Ltd., which is Australia’s main exchange operator. The blockchain is going down under, in a good way.


Thank you for reading our newsletter with the previous month’s best Bitcoin articles!

We tweet more cryptocurrency news and insights daily @HolyTransaction

Open your free digital wallet here to store your cryptocurrencies in a safe place.

Amelia Tomasicchio
What is Mining Infographic HolyTransaction

Infographic: What is Bitcoin Mining?

What is Bitcoin mining infographic HolyTransaction

Open your free digital wallet here to store your cryptocurrencies in a safe place.

jorge

9 Best Bitcoin Video Animations

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Satoshi

Bitcoin is “digital gold” and will mark the end of cash. Ametrano from IMI Bank explains.

(Sole24ore) Bitcoin is periodically back in the news, most of the time in a bad way like the recent presented use of the currency, then denied, from islamic terrorist authors of the attacks in Paris. At the same time banks and financial institutions seem extremely interested in the tech behind bitcoin.
We talk about this with Ferdinando Ametrano(*), from IMI Bank, Banca Intesa Sanpaolo group.
Professor Ametrano, what is Bitcoin?

Bitcoin is a private currency, that isn’t issued by any central bank nor guaranteed by any institution. It is electronically transferrable in a practically instant way, utilising a cryptographic security protocol. It is based on a completely decentralized network: the transactions don’t require a middleman, cannot be censored, don’t have any kind of geographical or amount restriction, and are possible 24 hours a day every day and are substantially free.

How can transaction be substantially free? Who covers the costs of the bitcoin network? Who guarantees its safety?
Bitcoin’s network security is handled by nodes, that validate transactions and are also called miners.
The costs that they sustain while doing this activity are covered by issuing new bitcoins.
We’re more and more hearing about blockchain, how is it related to bitcoin?
The validated bitcoin transactions are “stacked” in blocks. Every new block of transactions is written down on a public and distributed ledger, organised like a ordered chain of blocks. This public ledger is in fact called blockchain, a term generally used to define the underlying technology of bitcoin. The blockchain tech regulates the transfer of a “digital token” to the whom can be associated a variety of goods and rights of the real world. The token, that is fundamental for the existence of this technology, gains value due to its use in the digital world.
The bitcoin currency is in fact the digital token of the first and most distributed blockchain: it’s impossible separating the two. It’s hence possible having technological applications that “hide” the token or in which the token has a value not relevant if compared to the right or to the good that it represents, and avoid calling it bitcoin or utilising a different blockchain from the one bitcoin’s using.
Is it true that bitcoin’s author could be proposed for the nobel prize in economics?
The white paper that describes the bitcoin protocol was published around October 2008, by a person known as Satoshi Nakamoto, an identity which has yet to be confirmed. Nakamoto released the source code for Bitcoin in January 2009, and then he gradually vanished, leaving the development to others. He vanished completely around mid-2010, when he stopped answering to any message. As of today, even due to the poor understanding of Bitcoin and to the lack of diffusion it has, the Nobel prize is just a boutade.
We frequently hear about anonymity in bitcoin transactions. Why?
We should instead talk about pseudonymity: the blockchain is in fact a public ledger and all the transactions take place in a transparent way between the different bitcoin addresses, which are like IBANs from our bank accounts. There is not however any way to force the identification of the person or organization behind the address.
The lack of user identification and the fact that transaction can’t be censored are aspects that make bitcoin interesting for terrorists and criminals, don’t they?
In theory, yes. But in practice the interest is limited. The common sense suggests that the currency used by terrorist in still in most cases the US dollar, because it’s globally accepted.
Back in October the British Treasury has completed a study revolved around the key points in money laundering and terrorism financing: Bitcoin was found to be the one with less risk, before banks, legal services and accountancy, gambling, cash etc. We know that criminals use internet, cellular phones, and transport services: we can’t shame technology because of this.
There are always new challenges and we have to adapt to them: the authorities have shown they know how, for example when they took down Silk Road, the darknet market that used bitcoin as the go-to currency. The most sensitive point in the Bitcoin environment are for sure the exchanges, where people can buy and sell bitcoins: they represent the point where Bitcoin and the regulated financial system make contact, where suspect actions can be intercepted.
Obviously, regulating and prosecuting the illicit uses of bitcoin is necessary, exactly like how it’s done with all the other tools we have to our disposal. How far are we in doing this?
The international regulators are following with great attention the Bitcoin phenomenon. The New York Department of Financial Services has released last June, the so-called BitLicense, a regulatory framework developed in about two years of study and consultations. The head of this department said that the regulator should not, especially at this time of development, suffocate the innovation that this new technology brings. This was repeated in the following months by the chairman of the Australian Securities and Investment Commission and the Canadian Standing Senate Committee on Banking, Trade and Commerce. Bank of England defined this promising technology as a payment system.
The European Central Bank has published two studies. If other countries and states are prudent, Europe decided a more cautious approach: the European Banking Association urged national regulators to discourage banks from buying, selling and holding bitcoins.
And yet Banks, stock exchanges, and the financial institutions in general, even while staying away from bitcoin are really interested in blockchain technology.
Of course, and for an absolutely crucial reason. Financial transactions are reversible for a long time (with credit card chargebacks possibile for up to 6 months) and even when they seem to take an instant they are actually regulated (clearing and settlement) in two or three days after the transaction itself through central counter-parties and clearing houses. The settlement system is burdened by significant costs and levies. In a world where information travels instantly at virtually no cost, these layered and convoluted processes are inefficient, expensive and inadequate. The validation of a transition on blockchain happens at the same time as its clearing and settlement and is not reversible, resembling in a lot of ways cash transactions. When you receive bitcoins you are certain that whoever sends them is in real possession of them and that the transfer is immediately effective and irreversible.
How is Bitcoin’s monetary policy defined?
The validation of a new block of transactions happens every 10 minutes or so, and requires a significant work from miners. Those who exhibit this kind of work (proof-of-work) is paid back as of now with 25 bitcoins every block. This reward halves every four years and it will reach 0 approximately in 2140, when the system will have to cover its costs with transaction fees, that, at the moment, are negligible. This defines entirely bitcoin’s monetary policy.
So, can we expect the rise of new and more efficient financial services and the redefinition of the actual ones on through blockchain technology?
It’s hard to find clear arrival points in this pioneering phase. The ‘fundamentalists’ of the blockchain technology believe that the traditional financial world will be swept away completely; these are opposed to radical conservatives who believe existing financial institutions will instead simply incorporate and adapt the tech to its needs; as always, the truth probably stands in the middle. In any case, despite the general enthusiasm or concern, it is not yet clear if and which applications will be adopted by the traditional financial world.
The blockchain technology aims at uncensored transactions guaranteed by an inherently decentralized ecosystem. Decentralization is, however, naturally inefficient in terms of scalability in the number of transactions (about 3 per second, compared to the 60 thousand possible inside the centralized VISA network) and completely sealed against regulatory processes. These features make it a problem for financial institutions and regulators.
And yet blockchain technology is more and more being represented as able to solve all the problems that currently burden our financial system: costs, inefficiency, lack of transparency, etc.
I often have the impression that behind the blockchain innovation label is behind hidden the attempt to reform the organizational side of these processes even before the technological one. Many of the proposed solutions are simple misinformation, implemented through databases in a more efficient and cheap way than a blockchain. In general, the blockchain is suitable for public goods or services, which must therefore be handled in a transparent, decentralized way.
For example, the transfer of monetary value between different countries and different currencies: you could have IOUs issued and guaranteed by banking groups and placed on a circuit that automates their compensation. A similar situation is offered by Ripple, one of the distributed public ledger solutions alternative to bitcoin. It’s easy imagining a group of banks that share this idea, maybe utilising the concept in a different distribution.
It is recent news that thirty of the most important banks in the world have joined the R3CEV consortium. The goal is to make the public distributed ledger useful in the financial world traditional, going past scalability limits. Will Intesa Sanpaolo be there?
The event that you are describing is certainly the most interesting, if nothing else just for of the caliber of participants: Intesa Sanpaolo is considering whether to join or not and in any case it will be interesting to follow the work that will be done there. The performance limits of the current blockchain technology are intrinsic to the exceptional level of decentralized security: they can be mitigated or even improved by reintroducing a minimal centralization in the network. Along this path of centralization, however, you might find that the database technology has a competitive advantage. In recent months, the debate on the distributed records saw the opposition of public (no control, such as bitcoin) to private (controlled, as Ripple). It is open to question whether and how the private distributed registers differ from simple replicated databases.
What role could banks play in the blockchain ecosystem?
The stability of the financial market needs an influential player, able to provide adequate guarantees of reliability. Banks play this role in our economy, even if not flawlessly. The customer identification (for anti-money laundering and to fight of terrorism financing), being a ‘custodian’ for the whole system and granting its functionality, giving out credits, the market-making on financial markets: these and many other activities have the banks in leadership.
I don’t think the entry in the banking world of technology giants is imminent, although it should be noted that Apple capitalise about the same as the top 30 banks in the eurozone. Moreover, the British Bank Association wrote that “banks must agree to the fact that they are more and more part of a wide ecosystem that consumers themselves are building. Well, their role in the ecosystem is far from secure. ” A lesson has already been tried in other areas by leading brands such as Kodak, Blackberry or Blockbuster.
What is Intesa Sanpaolo doing right now? Between all the great international groups you are the ones with the most conservative public profile about it.
Our bank has been following the Bitcoin phenomenon since May 2014 at least. A study task force coordinated by our Chief Economist, Gregorio De Felice, worked six months involving all of the bank’s the different functions and summarised what should be the strategy guidelines for the group. In July, we responded publicly with a documented analysis to the “Call for Evidence” of the European Security Market Association. It is certainly a land where you need to move with caution: this is why we are evaluating with great selectivity a number of initiatives. I am confident that soon enough our operational choices will become more clear.
As of now bitcoin hasn’t really imposed itself as a currency for commercial transactions, not even online.
This because bitcoin is not a good currency for transactions, but rather a speculative investment. In the digital environment bitcoin it is more comparable to gold than to a currency, sharing with gold some severe limitations in the use. A good currency should have three characteristics: being a mean of exchange, utility conservation, unit of account. Bitcoin is unbeatable on the first two aspects: instantly transferable, divisible without limit, tamper-proof, non-perishable, with virtually zero cost of conservation, and it can be easily stored for later use.
The not so good sides of Bitcoin come out when analysing the unit of account: the currency, in general, is the good we reference when we measure the relative value of other assets. And a unit we use to measure. The value of each asset, however, is determined by the law of supply and demand: as the supply of bitcoins is deterministically fixed and completely inelastic, any change in demand is reflected in changes in value. The value of Bitcoin has appreciated by a few cents in 2010 to about $ 300 today (almost touching, with a frightening volatility, the level of $ 1,200 in 2013): this aspect makes the joy of speculators but makes it impossible to have stable prices in bitcoin, contract mutual, fix salaries or lock in forward prices.
In the recent years we’ve been hearing controversial things about e-money. So is bitcoin going to fail
I wouldn’t talk about failure: bitcoin could be used, in the future, as a digital “gold reserve” asset for a next generation of cryptocurrencies with a flexible monetary policy, the ones i call “Hayek Money”. Gold was adopted without any central planning by all civilizations in the world, for its peculiarities (the fact that it does not rust and its rarity) and uses (jewellery and ornaments). The adoption of bitcoin is spreading in a similar way in the digital domain, without central planning, for its peculiarities (available in a limited non-alterable quantity) and utilities (transferable token can not be duplicated). The possibilities that are opening up in money’s history are extraordinary.
What exactly do you mean?
Money is a social relations tool and on it we’ve based the whole exchange economy. It was created by mankind to cooperate with those who are outside of the gift economy, a characteristic of the family and of close relationships. Gold has historically established themselves as a monetary standard: the minting of the coin from Caesar will initially only confirmed purity and quantity. Gold has been gradually replaced by notes, that were initially conceived as certificates that could be converted into gold, guaranteed first from private individuals and later by kings, governments and central banks.
Gold has been gradually reduced as a tool of monetary policy, due to the restrictions it involves: today we use fiat money (fiat from the Latin “fiat lux et fuit lux“), money without intrinsic value whose acceptability is based on a social contract which determines the legal tender. All democracies and developed economies have delegated the management of the currency and its stability to an independent central bank, to avoid abuses that governments could make.
The Blockchain technology has the opposite trend: for the first time after thousands of years it looks like currency can be used without Cesar controlling it.
We often hear about non financial uses of the blockchain: public vehicle record, land register, digital id certification, notary services. What is your opinion about them?
With the blockchain we have for the first time a digital token which can be transferred, but cannot be duplicated. This opens new scenarios: I have great interest and curiosity in the various proposals and I try to support their development through participation in AssoB.it, the Italian association for the promotion of the blockchain technology. But i must confess that for know i see bitcoin as the killer app in blockchain technology, like e-mail was for internet back in the 90s. There will certainly be in future businesses and services difficult to predict, like Google, Amazon or Facebook we some time ago. Personally i’ve yet to identify them.
In a time of growing demand for dramatically scarce blockchain skills, i’m afraid that Italian universities are not really being receptive. Luckly something is moving with the private research center BlockchainLab in Milan.
What could be the next big thing in the bitcoin/blockchain environment?
The digitalization of cash, which is in my opinion the most urgent and inevitable. The pros of bitcoin over cash are its traceability, transparency and the fact that it’s impossible to forge it. The blockchain could be for payment systems what was internet for communication and information.
Author: Massimo Chiriatti, technologist and member of Assob.it
*F. Ametrano is a leading italian expert in the field of coins often called virtual, mathematical or cryptographic. Professor at the University Milano Bicocca is also a member of the supervisory body of AssoB.it

Open your free digital wallet here to store your cryptocurrencies in a safe place.

Satoshi