Ideologically, bitcoin is a currency. But, apart from fringe speculators, ideologues & novelty seekers its gaining traction as a payment method. That's great b

Ideologically, bitcoin is a currency. But, apart from fringe speculators, ideologues & novelty seekers its gaining traction as a payment method. That's great because a better payment methody something we really need. A payment method for a world where computers exist. Credit cards, paypal and friends are doing this job terribly, inequitably, opaquely and at a high cost. For "card not present" transactions credit cards work like this: (1) a merchant tells CC company (through payment gateways) that a customer wants to pay them some amount (2) the credit card company says OK (or no) (3) If at any point in the next 6 months the customer demands that money back, they take it out of the merchants account. If this happens too often, they cut off the merchant's ability to accept credit cards. Step 3 puts the entire cost of fraud on the merchant. They then find their own way of minimizing it. There's the cost of the actual payment processing (2%-4%), the cost of fraud & the cost of preventing fraud. That's around 2.5%-10% of gross. In some cases it just completely prevents entire business categories. This also amounts to a pretty steep competency requirement just to accept payments. There are a lot of businesses and business categories that just don't exist because the basic infrastructure of the digital economy (money) is crap. We're basically using seashells.