Cryptocurrency is a form of digital money with no physical coins or bills: it’s all online recorded on a public digital ledger. You can transfer cryptocurrency to someone without the need for an intermediary, as is required in the case of the dollar or euro with the presence of a bank or other payment institution.

People can use cryptocurrencies for quick payments and low transaction costs. Or consider cryptocurrencies as an investment, hoping that their value will increase. It is possible to buy cryptocurrency or get it in exchange for your work or accept it as a form of payment in your shop.

Here are 7 benefits of using cryptocurrencies:

1. Cost of Use
The current banking and financial system requires a fee for the custody and sending of money. To keep and send your money, you have to refer to financial intermediaries that charge you for their service. In some cases, such as that of money remittance or international wire transfers, this cost can have a significant impact compared to the money handled.

With cryptocurrency you can avoid relying on an intermediary for their custody, therefore taking care of them directly yourself, without having any cost. With regards to sending or using it as a form of payment, the transaction costs are usually much lower than those of the traditional system, and even potentially resulting in zero cost. Above all, these costs are not determined as a percentage of the payment amount sent, and are used to pay for the proper functioning of the infrastructure and not to a specific intermediary.

2. International Payment Standard
Today there are over 160 national currencies in the world, this requires an exchange fee depending on which currency you own and which one is accepted in the local country. Cryptocurrencies are the same all over the world, so if for example you pay in Bitcoin, it will be recognized and accepted in the same way all over the world. Cryptocurrencies are by their very nature an international currency, they are not tied to a specific geographical or political area.

3. Privacy
Cryptocurrencies allow you to share fewer personal data, this does not mean anonymity but pseudonymity, i.e. the data that appear in the public registers of the various blockchains are not directly linked to your identity but to alphanumeric pseudonyms. In this way you can guarantee greater confidentiality to your payment choices, as opposed to being totally tracked and analyzed by banks or credit cards and even governments.

4. Open to Everyone
The traditional financial system has barriers to entry, so not everyone is allowed to have a bank account or credit card. Worldwide there are about 1.7 billion adults remain unbanked, without an account at a financial institution or through a mobile money provider. In order to use a cryptocurrency account, you do not need to request authorization from anyone. A device such as a smartphone or a PC and an internet connection are sufficient to open an account and hold cryptocurrencies. The possibility of including 1.7 billion people in the world economic and financial system has enormous growth potential, as well as being able to reduce the disparities between the more developed and less developed countries.

5. Micropayments
The current monetary system makes payments under 50 cents uneconomical due to brokerage costs, effectively making micropayments impossible. Cryptocurrencies that have solved the scalability problems allow payments at costs below 1 cent, opening up to a market of still unexplored use cases, ranging from the payment of small digital content to services billed per second, without the need to set a minimum amount to be transferred.

6. Investment
If cryptocurrencies were to continue to spread worldwide, particularly the main ones such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, their value will increase exponentially because their issuance is limited, and in the case of Bitcoin it can be set to a maximum of 21 million Bitcoins. They are therefore also a form of investment accessible to anyone, without the requisites of being a qualified investor.

7. Programmable Money 
Cryptocurrencies have native features of programmability and integration into every software, which are not possible with a fiat currency unless resorting to external services and intermediaries. For this reason you will have in the future very sophisticated uses of your money more and more, with options that can be activated as a software to which you can assign rules that are able to have a dialogue with external factors. This is already possible today using smart contracts.

Interested in adopting cryptocurrency? Start using Monetum Exchange today.