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How to get Bitcoin into the hands of 2.4 billion people not using it today

Bitcoin has plenty of room to grow. With a market cap of roughly $1 billion USD, Bitcoin represents but a fraction of the United States’ $16.3 trillion USD money supply. Manu Sporny, founder of Digital Bazaar, is one of the people actively seeking to close the gap.

At the Inside Bitcoins NYC conference, Manu Sporny shared his answer to accelerate growth and provided a vision of adding 2.4 billion people to the Bitcoin ecosystem within the next five years.

Where might one find a market that large that can be on-boarded that quickly? To Sporny, the answer lies in the 2.4 billion people with access to the web and in the sheer global dominance of four popular web browsers: IE, Safari, Firefox and Chrome.

The challenge that naturally follows is how to integrate Bitcoin into the browser. Sporny is tackling this challenge by pushing for new W3C standards for the browser that will allow for more simplified transactions over the web.

The argument is that exchanging funds over the Web is far more complicated than it needs to be. While we can exchange massive quantities of data nearly instantaneously, financial transactions are slowed due to the speed of old money, credit card numbers, waiting for block chain verifications, PCI compliance and the like.

Exploring a Bitcoin Web Payments Solution

Sporny articulated two paths to easier and faster financial transactions.

The first is PaySwarm, a currency-agnostic standard for Web Payments. PaySwarm, being commercialized through a system called Meritora, is the first open, universal standard for payments on the Web, allowing users to execute zero-click payments of USD, Euro, Bitcoins or any other currency of their choosing.

The second option described by Sporny is the WebPayment API, another standard for browser-based payments being developed by Mozilla. The API would enable one-click purchase directly from the browser.

Sporny is very bullish on Bitcoin and with the potential creation of new W3C standards that will spur Bitcoin use, it’s now “time for entrepreneurs to get in on the ground floor.”

Authored by Michael Smouha and Ronan Murphy, Contributors to On Bitcoin

CC image by jurvetson