Every brilliant idea is at the very beginning ridiculed and greeted with skepticism.

For most part of history, money was commodity. money such as silver and gold coins. Commodity money was replaced with representative money, like the gold standard, following the development of economies and as traders found it difficult to carry commodity money with them. Fiat currencies became popular over the last hundred years and the basis of most modern monetary systems is fiat money.

So what’s this ‘bitcoin’? Any idea?

Digital currencies such as Beenz and Flooz, touted as alternative money, came into the scene around 2000, but soon disappeared as the tech bubble went bust. Most digital currencies are fiat money that is parleyed across the digital medium. Now, a new digital currency by name Bitcoin has come into existence.

Introduced in 2009, the popularity of Bitcoin has grown by leaps and bound and is being widely used on the Internet. Bitcoin, considered to be the first implementation of the concept known as crypto-currency, uses cryptography in order to control its creation as well as transactions instead of depending on central authorities. The creator of Bitcoin is known only by the programmer’s Internet identity alias Satoshi Nakamoto and by the end of 2010, Satoshi left the project.

Bitcoin witnessed a buy rally in the historic ‘US Shutdown’ in Oct 2013. Now it has landed on earth in the form of  ATM in Vancouver last week giving it acceptability as well as popularity.

The digital currency can be stored in the computer or in the online digital wallet and can be transferred safely and cheaply to anywhere in the world. Recently, CoinLab based in Seattle entered into a partnership with Mt Gox, the largest online Bitcoin exchange, in Japan in order to enable the users in Canada and U.S. to exchange the digital currency for dollars. Bicoins are currently accepted by companies like Reddit, WordPress, MegaUpload and Cups and Cakes, a San Francisco café. Startups like Colnbas and CoinLabs are also betting on Bitcoin.

It is believed that Bitcoin has been created to address the issue of shortage of funds experienced by key sectors. Most commercial banks and venture capitalists neither have the ability nor the inclination to lend money to small business as well as tech sectors. However, if Bitcoin is going to take care of the needs of these sectors, it will have to fulfill the two roles of money: a medium of exchange and a ‘store of value’ which can be extremely difficult.

Now would you buy into something you don’t understand be it new money or a new idea? That’s possibly the next trillion dollar question.