Читать книгу Cryptocurrency Mining For Dummies - Peter Kent - Страница 14

Back in the mid-90s, some of you may recall (and many of you were too young back then to remember this, I realize), people were wary of using credit cards on the Internet. When I had my own publishing company and was selling books through my website in 1997, I (Peter — Tyler’s too young to remember 1997) would often receive printouts of my website product pages in the mail, along with a check to pay for the book being purchased. I was taking credit cards online, but many people simply didn’t want to use them; they didn’t trust the Interwebs to keep their plastic safe.

In addition, setting up a payment gateway for credit cards was difficult and expensive for the merchant. These days, it’s a pretty simple process to add credit card processing to a website — it’s built into virtually all ecommerce software, and with services like Stripe and Square lowering the barriers of entry, getting a merchant account is no longer the huge hassle and expense it used to be.

Of course, we’re talking commercial transactions here, but what about personal transactions? How can someone send a friend the money they owe, or how can a parent send beer money to their child away at college? (I’m talking PPP … pre-PayPal and web-based transfers between bank accounts.) If we were going to live in a digital world, surely we needed digital money.

One important characteristic of cash is that cash transactions are essentially anonymous — there’s no paper trail or electronic record of the transaction taking place. Plenty of people thought an equivalent form of anonymous or pseudonymous digital currency would be a vast improvement over traditional settlement methods.

So, many people thought there had to be a better way. We needed a digital currency for a digital world. These days, perhaps that viewpoint seems naïve; looking back it was obvious that the credit companies weren’t going to see trillions of dollars of transactions shifting online and just wave goodbye! They wanted a piece of the action, unwilling to give up their monopoly, and so today, the primary transaction methods in the United States and most of Europe are bank cards of various kinds.