The Internet of Money

by Andreas M. Antonopoulos

How many of you have money in a bank? None of you has money in a bank. Do you store physical money in a safe deposit box? If so, maybe then you could say you have money in a bank. The rest of you have loaned your money to a bank. For the privilege of loaning your money to a bank, you will be paid the amazing interest rate of 0.00001 percent per year. Your bank will take that money, turn around, and loan it to the people standing next to you for 24.99 percent APR. This is a client-server relationship. Because that money only exists as a form of debt in a ledger that you do not control. A ledger that is stored by a server, and you are simply a client. In fact, you have no control over it at all. You don’t even have basic interfaces to that money unless that interface is mediated by the server. That’s what a client-server architecture does.