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“Because, if you wanted a Swiss franc transaction or a Japanese yen transaction or a U.S. dollar transaction, we can do that transaction for you,” he said. “If bitcoin [can be] a reliable medium of exchange, then at that point in the future, we would be able to [conduct business] with bitcoin.”

One of the key features of bitcoin is that transactions don’t require a third party to sign off, like a bank or a credit card company. Every time a credit card gets swiped, the issuer charges a small fee — typically around 3%. It doesn’t sound like much but it quickly adds up and consumers ultimately end up paying.

But since bitcoin transactions don’t require a third party, there’s effectively no fee — a huge benefit to the economy.

It’s also not controlled by any government or central bank. Bitcoin is part of a peer-to-peer software system. The amount in circulation is strictly controlled by an algorithm. That means it cannot be incorporated into any country’s monetary policy and new bitcoins can’t be created at the whim of central bankers.

In other words, the value of your savings won’t get inflated away because the government felt the need to turn on the money printing press — as the U.S. Federal Reserve has done.

A recent report by Goldman Sachs, the New York investment bank,predicted that Bitcoin would force banks and other traditional financial players to compete by lowering their costs and streamlining their systems.

So far, however, almost every major banking chief in North America has either stayed mum on, or openly derided, the currency that has been linked to fraud, theft and other criminal activity.