Electronic money, or e-money, is to normal money as email is to normal (snail) mail: it’s simply an electronic form of value exchange, but with a key advantage in that most types of e-money are not linked to any particular country or government. Electronic money has made big strides in social acceptance in the last decade. Dutch bank ABN Amro’s CEO recently said that the technology behind electronic money is the next big thing in global banking.
The king of e-money today is Bitcoin, created in 2009, shortly after the global economic and banking system shocks known now as the Great Recession. Bitcoin was the brain baby of a mysterious person known as Satoshi Nakamoto, who posted the 2009 Bitcoin white paper on a well-known cryptocurrency forum. His paper described the architecture and function of the new type of e-money that he had invented. Shortly thereafter he offered an open source software package that implemented the white paper’s ideas, and, with the mining of the first “block” of Bitcoin by Satoshi himself in 2009, Bitcoin was born.
