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Bitcoin and the world

When bitcoin was first created in 2009 by Satosohi Nakamoto, it was virtually unknown to anyone that wasn’t into cryptography or financial technology. Coming from the design paper, bitcoin was promised to be a revolutionary tool that could help us find a decentralized form of currency.

People were confused by this so-called “cryptocurrency” and not sure how to use it or what to use it on, to say the least. No one even knew how to compute for its exchange rate. What they did was to compute for the electricity consumption that a computer needed to mine a bitcoin. The first ever exchange rate was 1 US = 1,309.03 BTC… and we’ve come a long way since.

Late 2017 saw bitcoin at its highest exchange rate ever, reaching around $20,000 for one bitcoin. That was when bitcoin started getting the real attention. Everyone was freaking out about this new form of currency with an insanely high exchange rate.

Since then, bitcoins exchange rate has flirted within the 6,000-7,000 rate and although it isn’t quite popular as it was in late 2017, it still remains a part of people’s everyday life and is slowly being more and more accepted in the world.

Bitcoin’s uses

As mentioned earlier, no one really knew what to use bitcoin for when it was invented. One person even bought 2 pizzas (worth $25 at the time) for 10,000 bitcoins. It was probably a life-changing decision for that person now.

With bitcoin being a little bit more mature now, it is in a much better place now. There are a lot more uses to it and there are a lot more ways to spend it. A lot more restaurants and online retail stores accept bitcoin as a form of payment now. It’s even easier now to earn money with bitcoin with peer-to-peer platforms allowing vendors to set their own prices.

One thing that people often overlook with bitcoin is the benefits of trading gift cards for/with bitcoins. By trading your bitcoins for gift cards, you can get almost anything you want. For example, if you’re in need of a 1 terabyte hard drive and you find an ideal one on Amazon, you can buy Amazon gift cards with bitcoin and just use those gift cards to buy your hard drive. The deals you often find on peer-to-peer platforms like Paxful are often discounted and cheaper than ones you can get in-store.

The future

Despite the number of uses that are available to everyone around the world, a lot of people still remain uneducated about bitcoin. This hinders bitcoin from mass adoption by the world. Some people may have heard of it and have a grasp on what it is, but not a lot of people know how to benefit from bitcoin and how bitcoin can benefit the world.

Bitcoin’s true benefits to society can really be seen with the latest projects of Paxful’s #BuiltWithBitcoin movement. Not only are they aiming to build 100 schools all over Africa, but they have also provided scholarships for female Afghan refugees, showing that cryptocurrency can not only help on an individual scale but also on a community scale.

Nobody can tell for sure how long it’s going to take for bitcoin to reach mass adoption, but one thing’s for sure: it’s headed in the right direction. Projects like Paxful’s #BuiltWithBitcoin gift cryptocurrency enthusiasts an opportunity to show the rest of the world that there’s a lot of good that can be done.