Bitcoin will change the world, but no one knows how

On a Friday morning in Singapore, an eclectic group of misfits gathered in a room to discuss Bitcoin, a digital currency that’s making headlines across the world.

The crowd at Bitcoin Conference Singapore, the first of its kind in the country, was incredibly diverse: hackers, bankers, investors, researchers, and business people broke bread together and talked about what the currency could mean for the world.

According to Bitcoin angel investors Edan Yago and Roger Ver, the technology could liberate the masses from obsolete financial systems and privacy-violating technology companies like Facebook, Apple, and Google.

For Bitcoin miners and speculators, the currency represents a gold rush where early adopters stand to gain from the ever-rising bitcoin prices and the arbitrage occurring across various exchanges. Joseph Lee, a bitcoin trader and entrepreneur, told the audience that he has turned $100 worth of bitcoins into $200,000, and there’s more yet to be made.

While their motivations couldn’t be more different, there was a common sense of excitement surrounding the technology, no doubt magnified by the bubble that is currently expanding in the Bitcoin universe — prices in BTC China, a Bitcoin exchange, soared to around $436 a bitcoin on the day of the conference.

The buzz was a big contrast from the wider web and mobile startup scene, which has come to be more about exits, optimization, and the bottom line rather than world-changing ideas.

The conference was like the famous Homebrew Computer Club in Silicon Valley all over again — Bitcoin hobbyists took the stage to talk about their ideas, the technical subtleties behind their particular implementation, and the challenges of getting the masses to accept an alien-like currency that’s like nothing they’ve encountered before.

Why should anyone care about bitcoin?

Borderless, seamless, and decentralized, Bitcoin is a currency for a digital era. Proponents say it could upend the global financial system and change the way we transact and live. At one of the panel sessions, bitcoin angel investor Roger Ver, with a trademark evangelistic zeal, pitched the benefits of bitcoin:

It’s the first time in history where anyone situated in any place can send and receive any amount of money to anyone in the world.

Unlike fiat currency — the government-regulated coins and banknotes that we’ve known for centuries — Bitcoin operates on open-source code that is governed by the community. And while fiat currency is generally inflationary in that it decreases in value over time, Bitcoin is deflationary because there is an upper limit of bitcoins that can be digitally mined. The number, 21 million, creates a perception of scarcity and fuels the speculation going on right now.

Fully digital and peer-to-peer, bitcoin do not require intermediaries to work, save for miners who operate specialized computers which generate Bitcoins from thin air by solving mathematical problems that translate bitcoin transactions into the blockchain, essentially a kind of public ledger accessible to anyone.

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