SHOULD you judge a currency by the company it keeps? Bitcoin enthusiasts say it represents a whole new way of transacting online. So it has proved – but the upstart digital currency is so far best known as an illicit medium of exchange for black marketeers.

The key attraction for these shady early adopters is Bitcoin’s combination of publicly recorded transactions and anonymous ownership. Now researchers have highlighted how this can also streamline legitimate online commerce (see “Bitcoin moves beyond mere money“).

Peek into the future, and it’s possible to envisage this sort of technology being used to cut intermediaries out of trades of many kinds – beginning with payment systems such as Visa and moving on to banks, real estate and more. Transactions could be arranged, executed, verified and publicly recorded automatically.

The resulting commercial and social disruption would be huge. That might seem a stretch for an untested technology with a dicey reputation. But early internet shopping was also viewed as edgy before security was ramped up.


E-commerce cleaned up its act and changed the world. Maybe b-commerce will too.

This article appeared in print under the headline “The b-commerce revolution”