Imagine you’re a businessman on a trip around the world. You begin your journey at LAX in Los Angeles with a cup of coffee while you wait to board your flight to Narita. Upon arriving in Tokyo you hail a cab to a local restaurant, eat some lunch, and walk to your meeting. You rest for the night at a hotel near the airport. You check out in the morning and make your way back to the terminal to begin boarding for Belgium. Once in Bruges you decide to see the local sights in your down time. You join up with a tour group and head for the top of the belfry, but are generally offended by the implications of an Englishman who says “I wouldn’t go up there. It’s really narrow”. After the tour, you join up with the crew for your final meeting, get it over with, and hit the bar. All of this is appended by a night in an inn and one final flight back to LA. This is a fairly straightforward adventure, right? Wrong. With the current state of world currency a trip like this would quickly become a stressful series of bank exchanges and confusion over what locations will accept which form of payment. This is why we need a universal currency. A system of credit that would be accepted by every major retailer and service provider around the world would make travel situations completely seamless. With the rise of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, this scenario is becoming increasingly plausible. For those who haven’t been made aware yet, Bitcoin is a digital payment system that was introduced in early 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto. It is a peer to peer payment system that has no central repository and no single administrator. Some consider the difficulty of tracing transactions made with cryptocurrency to be a benefit, though let’s be honest. Nothing is 100% untraceable. You can dilute yourself into thinking that Bitcoin is the unsinkable ship, but you’ll eventually find it going the way of the titanic in terms of privacy. There are a few legal concerns surrounding digital currencies, one of which being the use of cryptocurrency in laundering money. Another concern is the legality of its use altogether. This isn’t an issue for most of the world but if you live in Iceland, foreign exchange laws prevent Bitcoin from being used. China has also recently put restrictions on the use of cryptocurrency. Then there is the strange case of Russia wherein digital currencies are entirely legal but purchases made with anything other than the Ruble are illegal, meaning you can have it but you can’t actually use it. The concept of a universal digital currency is still in its infancy but in the coming decades, I suspect there will be movements that spread the notion and smooth out some of the hitches that have arisen. This is not a suggestion that you go out and invest in Bitcoin as this is a worldwide issue that is not going to pull itself together overnight. This is simply an examination of the current state of world currencies and a hypothetical solution.
