" Five digital finance reasons why your pocket is about to be lighter "

Money as a concept has changed a lot over the years - from mounds of salt back in Roman times ('salary' is derived from the Latin for salt) through to gold, then innumerable currencies and now to today's vast digital transactions. Sure, there's a lot of cash still sloshing around, but the big deals are all electronic.

Increasingly that's trickling down to us consumers too - from Wave and Pay in your local city bar, paperless bank statements and Oyster cards, through to rumors that Denmark is planning to go entirely digital. old money is on the run.

What's surprising is that your established high street bank is currently all in favor of digital transactions - they're cheaper to manage and a chance to slice off a fee.

But once consumers are happy with purely conceptual money then the role of banks themselves may start to change, and there's a wealth of alternative 'versions' of cash out there which are ready to exploit the new chapter of currency.

The changes coming our way are pretty big: from just altering the way we spend our cash to completely new types of money that could alter the financial landscape of the world, there's a lot to get your head around - so here's some help on that front.

Bitcoin





The behemoth of digital currencies, Bitcoin isn't just an alternative method of spending money. Its creators proposed that it could replace the traditional financial system entirely, ushering in a new utopia of hassle-free, unfettered consumerism.

The key to the open-source distributed digital currency is that, unlike pounds or dollars, nobody owns or manages it, so it depends almost entirely on the trust of its users.