When I say “anyone,” that’s only scratching the surface because, ironically enough, not only does programmable money not recognize borders, it also does not recognize people. It doesn’t matter if you’re a person or a refrigerator or a self-driving car. Throughout the history of money, ownership of currency required personhood, either as an individual or as an association of individuals in a corporation. Bitcoin can be owned by machines, bitcoin can be owned by software agents; machines can pay each other and those payments are not just about economic activity. They are the basis for market-based security systems, the basis for creating bonds of authentication between devices, the basis of new applications that have never been done before.
1.2.3.A Unified System of Money
Bitcoin unifies systems of money. Today we have systems of money for small payments, systems of money for large payments. We have systems of money for payments between individuals, for payments between companies, and for payments between governments.
Does that remind you of something? That’s how communication used to be before the internet. We had systems of communication for pictures, systems of communications for letters, systems of communication for short-distance and long-distance. The internet came along and unified all of those. The Internet of Money creates a single network which can handle everything from a microtransaction to a gigatransaction—in seconds, anywhere in the world, for any participant, without permission.
