For a long time in history, money has been a democratic good. Different parties and organizations were issuing their own coins. This gave people a chioce between different currencies.

This situation changed when governments decided to have a monopoly over the issuance of money. This left people with less choices and an additional burdensome tax called inflation. Today, digital currencies like Bitcoin give us the opportunity to change this situation. <!-- break -->

Digital currencies give us a choice again. We can choose between money issued by national governments or decentralized digital money that can be transferred almost instantaneously at very low cost around the world.

The talk will discuss the main advantages of the use of digital currencies. It will highlight which opportunities arise from the technological protocol that’s behind Bitcoin. Some of the promising developments that have already started based on the Bitcoin protocol will be presented. The keywords here are smart property and contracts which enable decentralized exchanges and many other applications. We will see how these functionalities will reduce the power of financial intermediaries like banks and exchanges and how they enable the users.