**1. Introduction**

Change is the only *constant* the world witnesses, and it is certainly inevitable. Toward the end of the 1990s, the information technology phenomenon had the world tied together, and the Internet has surely revolutionized the world. Considering it is only 20 odd years old, here comes another paradigm shift in the form of Internet of *value* or data technology. The economies around the world are considering, what may be the end of the largest Financial Intermediaries, The Banks! It was a fearful thought but so were the palm tops, where the tech gurus predicted that everyone will be walking around with a computer in their hands. The thought was scrapped by many, but it became a reality sooner than it was predicted. Developed in 2008 by an anonymous under the name of Nakamoto [1], Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency, was introduced to the world. A 'virtual currency' [2], which is defined as any type of digital unit, used as a medium of exchange, a unit of account, or a form of stored value. The idea was close to the gold standard but with an alternative view. To

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#### 270 Financial Management from an Emerging Market Perspective

**Figure 1.** Bitcoin circulation: the mining map.

tackle inflation and its value, Bitcoins have a predetermined number of having 120 million Bitcoins in circulation around the world for the next 25 years. At the moment, 16.5 million Bitcoins [3] have already been mined. So, is this the currency of the world, without having any central authority?

Prominent Market Analysts [4] compare it to the "sharing" economy, which is expected to grow from \$15 billion in 2015 to \$335 billion by the year 2025, according to a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers. Airbnb, founded in 2008, is a notable player in the sharing economy. The company provides a platform for property owners and visitors to agree and transact short-term rental contracts. While it does not own rental properties, Airbnb today has over 2 million listings in 34,000 cities in 191 countries, generating annual revenue of over \$1 billion with a market value of \$24 billion.

The decentralized cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, relies on blockchain technology to record its transactions in a public ledger: a technology originally conceived for Bitcoin in 2008 and first implemented in 2009. The blockchain [5] is a distributed database that maintains a continuously growing list of records called blocks secured from tampering and revision. Each block contains a timestamp and a link to a previous block. It serves as the public ledger for all transactions. Every compatible client can connect to the network, send new transactions to it, verify them, and take part in the competition to create new blocks. The competition creating new blocks is known as mining. The Bitcoin design has been the inspiration for other applications and certainly for other cryptocurrencies. If blockchain technology is like metal, then Bitcoin is like gold (**Figure 1**).
