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Bitcoin Usher in Digital Currency Age Essay

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Introduction: Can Bitcoin Usher In the Digital Currency Age? The Bitcoin network was started on January 3, 2009 and the first Bitcoins were issued. Only one year later official exchange rates were set for Bitcoins. Bitcoins as an example of a purely digital currency carry with them both risks, and benefits, but I feel that the risks will be outweighed by the benefits:
• Small Risk of Inflation
• Small Risk of Collapse
• Safe and Cheap Transactions
• Easily Transported
• Virtually Untraceable
This last benefit is also a risk as having an untraceable currency lends itself to be sought after for criminal activities as it is potentially harder to be traced to its source than cash, the current go to for criminal activity. This will likely
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This is because there are simply a finite number of Bitcoins that will ever be available to the public (roughly twenty-one million). Since its inception the release of Bitcoins has slowed down quite a bit, and within a few decades the limited number of Bitcoins left will all be released through being found by the “minig” processes. It is theorized that this will happen around the same time that the world population is thought to stop growing. The population level off, though it has many dates and population sizes associated with it, averages out to about one Bitcoin for every 500 people in the world. Due to its nature the standard can be set to establish what a truly finite currency would mean for the world as a whole, and will help to remove what is essentially a tax on accumulated wealth when more money is being printed. While this doesn’t seem to be as prominent her in the United States other countries suffer from far greater inflation issues and Bitcoins are being used in lieu of the official currency as “TradeHill, a US-based bitcoin exchange, is now planning to open an office in Argentina where demand is fastest in the region. (Webber, 2013)” These facts couple well with the smaller risk of a complete collapse of the Bitcoin currency, or a purely digital currency, as it is not directly tied into a government entity, and will not live and die by the viability of that government entity. If one government were to fall the effect on
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