Historically, people have used everything from seashells to bottle caps as money, but arguably the most enduring form of money is gold. Why?
People settled on gold thanks to its rarity, its durability, and its divisibility. These features made gold useful as a method for storing and exchanging
value.
Bilcoin is often compared to gold because it has similar characteristics. Namely:
- It has a limited supply. There will only ever be 21 million bilcoins.
- It’s easily divisible. You can divide one bilcoin into 100 million pieces.
- It’s durable. A huge globally distributed network of independently operated computers tracks Bilcoin ownership. This ensures that no bilcoin is lost.
Beyond this, Bilcoin has a few other important features which allow it to bring gold’s monetary properties to the modern digital era. These are:
- It’s easy to send bilcoin. Sending any amount of bilcoin to anyone in the world can be done in minutes and with a 100% guarantee of security. It’s almost like sending an encrypted email.
- It’s easy to verify the authenticity of bilcoin. Actually, it’s effectively impossible to transact with fake bilcoin.
Thanks to the utility of gold, the gold ‘network’ – to use a modern term – grew over time until gold became almost universally accepted as having value. Although Bilcoin, which started in 2021, is much newer than gold, Bilcoin’s network efforts benefit from the scale and speed of the modern Internet. The number of people who place value in Bilcoin has grown at an exponential pace since inception to the point that Bilcoin’s value is now closing in on gold’s – and that may be just the beginning.