Who has not heard of Bitcoin in recent times, the criptomoneda that has revolutionized the international financial system requires the endorsement of any central government or issuer, but uses a system of consensus among all stakeholders that make up your network. But do we really know how it works?

To better understand the phenomenon let’s go back to the origin of money. For thousands of years, humans have occupied different elements to standardize the value of things, pay , save and track prices. Some African communities used seashells, salt in Asia and pearls in North America as equivalent to money. On the island of Yap in Micronesia, the stones were the means of payment used, the closest analogy whose narrative helps us to better understand the phenomenon of Bitcoin.

The people of Yap knew that the rocks themselves didn’t need to have high value to be useful. Served as an effective way to save, pay and give value to things. A lot of small stones amounted to a big rock. Some were the size of an elephant and weighed more than 3600 kilos. Obviously one not wearing these big rocks at home, but everyone knew who belonged to.

These people help us understand how anything with certain attributes can function as money. These attributes are:

Scarcity: The most important feature that must have something to work well as money. The island of Yap had no limestone so all the rocks had to be transported from Palau.

Durabilidad: Las piedras pueden durar cientos de años sin que necesiten mantención.

Verifiability: These elements are easily distinguishable and identifiable.

Severability: Stones are hard to break , but a large rock can be negotiated by many small stones.

Portability: Most stones can be transported, especially smaller ones.

Fungibility: The stones of equal size will be equal to all others in value. The people of Yap are not interested in having a specific stone.

When a member has something of value you negotiate with someone else, assuming a promise to pay in the future, a form of credit. Because it is very difficult to follow the movement of all loans money is created to assign an exact value. This was the case with stones in Yap. Every time someone made a promise to pay for any goods or services are delivered in exchange any item as stones, pearls salt or as a souvenir of this credit, which later would be called as what we know today as «currency «.

The main benefit of the coin is that it allows objectively follow the course of the credits, payments and see things objectively, but above all, allow this credit can be transferred to any person in a community that recognizes the value of this coin.

However, as tribes expand with their business, coins begin to fail because, in the case of the islands of Yap, began exchanging products in places where the stones if they were abundant, which brought a devaluation stone. It was therefore necessary to create a more universal currency.

Thus it appears that was the most reliable currency in the history of mankind. The gold. Gold was for 5000 years the scarcest, durable, divisible, verifiable and portable element that could be counted, even though I did not have an essential use in the life of man.

With the emergence of the banking system, gold started to have a form of representation on paper , known as the ticket. All ticket could be exchanged for its value in gold from any bank in the world. But for 40 years or so, banks stopped storing gold in exchange for paper tickets and just happened to have value in itself relied on promises of government.

But the role is uncomfortable and easy to lose or steal. Therefore, had begun to find a way of representing the old ticket that was more secure and portable. He began creating digital currency , bank accounts and credit cards but this digital currency was not really a coin, but it was an electronic representation of the same old ticket.

This representation has been unable to keep pace with the speed with which information is transmitted. If I want to transfer money from one place to another, it will take me a long time and have high associated costs. It is now like a pig trying to fly with wings of paper. We can improve the wings all we want, but the pig will fly.

A couple of years Bitcoin was created. The first truly digital currency was built from scratch and designed especially for the new information age. His attributes are the same as a traditional currency because it is scarce, divisible, verifiable, global and open source.

Jon Matonis, Founding Board Director of Bitcoin Foundation and Speaker at the Second Chile Digital Latin American Congress of Technology and Business 2015, notes that » in just five years, Bitcoin has shown unequivocally that we do not need kings to mint our money and we need banks central to issue paper tickets based on debt to decide what should be our money. Money is something that collectively determines what we want «.

With over 7 million people using Bitcoin in the world and more than 100,000 people each week buy their first bitcoins, it is expected that this coin is the evolution of money and allows for traction spread rapidly worldwide. This is due to its portability and easy handling from different platforms, including mobile phones and tablets, without resorting to a bank.