What is Crypto-Currency and Why You Should Accept It

You've heard of it on the news, in the papers, and online. It created overnight millionaires while making others broke. Governments are afraid of it and the public is confused by it. But it is here to stay.

What am I talking about, you ask?  Crypto-currency

In 2009, an anonymous online entity, going by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto, released a tremendously well-researched and thought out paper;explaining how an online, peer-to-peer, currency which would not be regulated or backed by any government could change the face of world finance. Shortly after, he released the first example of such a currency, Bitcoin.

Due to the technical and anonymous nature of Bitcoin (and crypto-currency in general), the digital currency adoption started out slow and within more "internet advanced" circles of people. After a few years and a minuscule adoption rate, Bitcoin started to gain notoriety. This was mainly due to the creation of a "dark-net" marketplace, The Silk Road, in 2011. Unfortunately, this marketplace seemed to specialize in nefarious and illegal activities such as drug dealing and weapons trafficking. The users of the marketplace used Bitcoin as the go to currency for transactions because its use was anonymous and incredibly difficult to track.

Fast forward to 2013; The Silk Road was shut down but Bitcoin knowledge started to go mainstream. Services like exchanges, payment processors, and wallets (coin storage) began to spring up. The tech world seemed to catch a crypto-currency fever and it hasn't looked back since. In November and December of 2013 the value of Bitcoin sky-rocketed to $1200 per coin. People became millionaires in the blink of an eye.

Today, there are many more varieties of crypto-currency. These currencies, such as Litecoin and Dogecoin, were created to improve on Bitcoin's original code and theory. And they are also gaining an incredible amount of traction in the financial world.

My personal favorite crypto-currency is Dogecoin. It is the second largest coin in terms of transaction volume and active users, only behind Bitcoin. It has a massive community behind it and is gaining wide-spread, mainstream acceptance as it is easy to get into and learn.

Now, why should you consider selling your LEGO sets for crypto-currency? There are many reasons, but for the sake of brevity in today's introduction, I will give you two.

• It is a brand new technology and you would have a chance to get in on the ground-floor on something that is shaping up to change the world. Only a relatively small portion of the population is using crypto-currency today, but as more merchants accept it, more people will use it.
• With the creation of online and in-store payment processors there is absolutely zero risk.

These payment-processors (think "Visa" or "American-Express"), make it absolutely painless to accept crypto-currency. Many of them, such as Coinbase and Moolah, automatically transfer crypto-currency to other more "common" currency such as USD or EUR. This makes it so that you can reach an even larger audience than you are today; the people using government-backed currency and the people who are using crypto-currency.

This is only the first post of an entire blog in which I am to educate all off you about the benefits and processes of accepting digital currency. If you have any specific questions or would like to learn more about a certain topic, don't hesitate to ask!