Enter the cryptocurrencies
As we approached 2030, technology seems to be offering new ways of thinking about money. Unless you were a government, printing currency was cumbersome, costly, and mostly illegal. Digital cryptocurrencies are neither cumbersome nor costly to create, and until governments forbid them they tend to proliferate quickly. Currently, the total value of cryptocurrencies in use teachers hundreds of billions of dollars(though this is admittedly difficult to calculate with precision).
While bitcoin as a currency has had its ups and downs-as reflected in its value falling from a peak of nearly $20,000 at the end of 2017 to less than $2,500 a year later-the underlying digital infrastructure has endured. The reason is that the blockchain provides a simple, elegant, and efficient solution to the classic “double-spend problem.” That is, how is it possible to prevent someone from using the same means of payment more than once, as when someone uses counterfeit money to pay for things? The blockchain overcomes this issue by making the digital registry open, transparent, and verifiable by the people who participate in it so that no double-spending of the same bitcoin can take place.
2030 by Mauro.F.Guillen: 209–211
