Sunday, March 23, 2014

Bitcoin's promise: a financial revolution the web's been waiting for | Reuters

 One of Bitcoin enthusiast Mike Caldwell's coins in this photo illustration at his office in Sandy, Utah, September 17, 2013. REUTERS/Jim Urquhart

(Reuters) - Bitcoin may not be the messiah of a new currency its hardcore fans yearn for, but it may herald the deeper financial revolution the internet has been waiting for.

While computers and smartphones have brought the web to more than a third of the world's population, online commerce still largely depends on a banking system that has changed little over recent decades, some of it relying on computer code written before the web was born.

The growing interest in bitcoin, a digital currency that requires no centralized body to handle transactions, is beginning to change all that.

Read more...Bitcoin's promise: a financial revolution the web's been waiting for | Reuters