When I first met Brian Nelson in downtown Salt Lake City, he gave me one billion dollars.

Seriously. I've still got the note with me. It reads: "I promise to pay the bearer on demand ONE BILLION DOLLARS for the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe."

Today, it's worth about eight cents in U.S. dollars, says Nelson, a Sandy-based entrepreneur and founder of Sig3. He hands the billion dollar notes out like business cards and to promote his interest in the digital Bitcoin currency. It shows just how misplaced is "the trust that we have put in government to manage the economy correctly."

Conversely, the alternative — the flourishing and eventual mainstream usage of a free-market currency like Bitcoins — could be the truly significant technological innovation of our era.

My Zimbabwe paper bill may be of limited transactional value. But as a lesson on the perils of hyperinflation, repeated world over from Germany to Zimbabwe to Argentina, it’s priceless.

The temptation for central banks to print paper dollars is simple too great, even though that act undermines money's essential element as a store of value.

Yet in the United States in recent years, inflation rates have been steady, consistent and low. That’s why it may be difficult to appreciate Bitcoins and the seemingly quixotic pursuit of an alternative to government-based money.

Bitcoin enthusiasts Austin Craig and Beccy Bingham might even agree with the part about it being "quixotic." Craig is the co-founder of the Pocket Film Festival in Provo, which earlier this month premiered his documentary, "Life on Bitcoin." In it, the newlyweds humorously depict and explain their commitment to live the first 90 days of their post-honeymoon married life using only Bitcoins.

It wasn't easy, but they did it. They took care of all their essentials — food, clothing and fuel — and ended up traveling outside of their Provo hometown to New York, Sweden, Germany and Singapore.

In a conversation after the screening, the married couple said it would have been easier had they made the movie today instead of two years ago: As understanding of the technology increases, merchants are no longer threatened by it, and more and more of them accept Bitcoins.

The Bitcoin was invented and released to the public less than six year ago, and its growth has been tremendous. The value of the Bitcoin market is now estimated at $3.5 billion.

But the true innovation behind Bitcoins is less about their exchange value on a given day, and more about what the technology behind their use enables: the ability to send money without going through an intermediary, like a bank.

"Bitcoin gives us, for the first time, a way for one Internet user to transfer a unique piece of digital property to another Internet user, such that the transfer is guaranteed to be safe and secure, everyone knows that the transfer has taken place, and nobody can challenge the legitimacy of the transfer," entrepreneur and investor Marc Andreessen wrote in The New York Times. "The consequences of this breakthrough are hard to overstate."

Andreesen pokes apart the commonly held fallacy that the Bitcoin is an anonymous currency and therefore a haven for bad behavior.

On the contrary, Bitcoins make use of a development known as public-key encryption. As with open-source software, which is secure precisely because its source code is public, Bitcoins make transactions secure by making them public. All Bitcoin transactions are cryptography logged forever.

They are recorded in something called the blockchain. Think of it as the double-entry bookkeeping system for the Internet.

Just as the development of personal computers in the 1970s paved the way for the commercialization of the Internet in the 1990s, the widespread availability of this computer network's most prevalent application may, in the future, be the result of this public blockchain.

For the billion-dollar toting entrepreneur Nelson and others, the blockchain Third World country, low-cost banking and legal services for the unbanked, widespread micropayments, or other services that have yet to be invented.

One of the most audacious is the effort by Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, another Bitcoin enthusiast, to create a market for securities completely independent of intermediaries like the New York Stock Exchange or NASDAQ. He calls the system Medici, the banking family that revolutionized finance in Renaissance Florence through double-entry bookkeeping.

"We are a very empowered people in Utah, and we understand that life is what we make of it," explains Nelson. "This self-reliance is one thing that is driving the Bitcoin ecosystem."

With the emergence of new economic norms like ride-sharing, time-sharing and other peer-based economic activities, Nelson sees "Bitcoin as putting power into the hands of the people. It is the blockchain that is going to be the fuel in the shift to the sharing economy."

Drew Clark is of counsel at the law firm of Kirton McConkie, where he deals with technology, media and telecommunications. Connect on Twitter @drewclark or via email at drewclark@kmclaw.com.