Money of the People

**Here’s why bitcoin is important to me.**  Approximately 1 billion people currently have access to banking, credit, and international finance capabilities—primarily the upper classes, the Western nations. Six and a half billion people on this planet have no connection to the world of money. They operate in cash-based societies with very little access to international resources. They don’t need banks. Two billion of these people are already on the internet. With a simple application download, they can immediately become participants in an international economy, using an international currency that can be transmitted anywhere with no fees and no government controls. They can connect to a world of international finance that is completely peer-to-peer. Bitcoin is the money “of the people. At its center are simple mathematical rules that everyone agrees on and no one controls. The possibility of connecting these 6 1/2 billion people to the rest of the world is truly revolutionary. > "Bitcoin is the money of the people." Payment processors are going to be affected. These enormous companies charge higher fees to send money to poorer destination countries, a situation that is exploitative and corrupt. These organizations make enormous profits for a function that can be done in bitcoin nearly for free. As the adage of the entire internet once went, > “I just replaced your entire industry with 100 lines of Python code,” that’s exactly what we’re doing with bitcoin.” #### Excerpt from Andreas Antonopoulos - The Internet of Money