Digital Currencies and the Future: Will Bitcoin change the world? Bit Trade Australia essay winner Gareth Williams presents the potential of Bitcoin to the future. This was presented at the Bitcoin Barcamp in Sydney on 15th March 2014. To view the full talk or find more presentations from Australia's first pop-up unConference on cryptocurrency innovation, go to www.bitcoinbarcamp.org

1. The future of digital currency:
Will Bitcoin Change the World?
Bitcoin Essay Winner
The positive force of bitcoin
Gareth Williams

2. 2
A New Force in the World Today
Marriage of two ideas:
• Trustless cryptographic transactions
• Distributed consensus systems
Open, public infrastructure:
• Network is neutral
• Politically agnostic

3. So, what is it
capable of?
Replacing troublesome, expensive, failure- and corruption-
prone humans with trustless cryptographic protocols...

4. 4
“Trustless” ?
• Removing the need for trust
• Synonymous with “failure-proof”
One example:
• Cutting out the middle man in gambling
• Possible to execute a remote coin flip trustlessly
over the Internet
• People could gamble against each other with zero
house edge

5. 5
The door is wide open...
Hundreds of revolutionary ideas suddenly do not exist
only because nobody has coded them yet.
• A P2P stock exchange
• Micropayments
Bitcoin enables “permissionless innovation”

6. 6
Lifting people out of poverty
• Foreign workers remitting money back home
• Unrestricted access to the global marketplace...
• … and to capital investment
• Levelling the playing field
Bitcoin is banking for the world,
accessible to anyone with a smart phone

7. 7
Censorship Resistance
• Bitcoin payments as difficult to block as information
on the internet
• Financial freedom to accompany the freedom of
information we've all become accustomed to
• Wikileaks receive the majority of their donations as
cryptocurrency

8. 8
Way out there stuf
The idea of a “Decentralised Autonomous Corporation”
• A company’s behaviour is governed by people
following a set of rules (algorithms) to achieve
clearly defined goals
• Somebody had to ask: “Could we do away with
the people, and just stick with the
algorithms?”
• Automating human labour at the top end of
the pay scale

9. Could Bitcoin be
superceded by
something else one day?

10. 10
Odds stacked in Bitcoin’s favour
Bitcoin is, at heart, a distributed consensus system
Network effects
Individuals incentivised to acquire a currency
appreciating in value
An elegant bootstrapping mechanism, to get from
from zero to worldwide use

11. 11
THE Global Cryptocurrency
Bitcoin is, and has the momentum to remain, the
premier global cryptocurrency
Altcoins (perhaps even national currencies?) are
destined to eventually be deserted like the orphaned
blocks that belong to a chain that diverges from
consensus
The value of a global currency to facilitate trade is
hard to overstate

12. Bitcoin interprets
a world full of splintered
national currencies
as a consensus problem
and incentivises
convergence
Analogous to the internet,

13. You can’t stop the signal.
What do you think Bitcoin
could change in the world?