A Tale of Bitsburgh

To help understand the greatness of bits, we have a little story for you. Although this tale is sci-fi, it exhibits some ways that bits are used in the real world…

It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood, so you decide to take a walk to the mall. You are wondering around the local computer store and you come upon an interesting device. It is a little black box, on one side there is a slot much like a vending machine, in where you can insert dollar bills. On the other side, a USB port. Written on the sticker, “MAGIC CASH-digitize your money and send it via the internet anywhere in the world!” This peaks your curiosity and it only costs a few bucks.

Remembering how you once had to send some cash to your brother who lives in Japan, you buy two and mail him one. The last time you sent him cash, you used a costly money transfer service and the funds took days to arrive, barely on time for him to make rent.

A week or so goes by, and you get a call from your bro. Not only did he get the package, but once again, he is in desperate need of some financial help (Yes, the universe works in mysterious ways).

So you both get your devices hooked up to your computers and fire them up. There isn’t much to the instructions, just a prompt that tells you to enter your email address. You go ahead and feed it a one-dollar bill as a test run, just to make sure it works. It gobbles up the dollar bill, and after a few grinding noises and small puff of smoke…BAM! You get an email that reads “one digital dollar available”. So, you forward the email to your brother and once he opens it…BAM! again, the dollar comes out of his device in Japan!

You go on to inserting, 5’s, 10’s, 20’s, then a 100, and everytime like clockwork, his device spits out the same bill halfway across the globe. “This is great”, he says, “I’m going to try opening the same email and hopefully it will keep spitting out hundred dollar bills!”

Quickly, he finds that the system doesn’t quite work that way. There is no way to actually duplicate the bill, it’s only one in and one out, it even appears to be the same exact bill, with the same serial numbers and all. Besides, that would be counterfeiting, a big no-no in the US and Japan.

Upon playing with the device a little further, you come upon some other interesting features. You tell your brother to write a message on the dollar bill and send it back to you through the device. Low and behold, the dollar comes out of your device with a smiley face on it. It is as though the bills are actually being digitized, turned in to electrons, and then coming back out exactly as they went in, only this time it’s half-way around the globe.

Delving even deeper into your magic money box, something you didn’t notice. There is a slot on the side, for coins. This means there must be a way to make change for any bills that you feed it. This calls for further investigation. You turn the box over and notice that there is a sticker for the device’s company website.(Why is all the good information always hiding?)

Now that you are fully submerged into the rabbit hole, your mind gets blown even further. You learn that you can program your box so that when you load as little as a penny into it, and the magic box somehow mashes up the penny and miraculously spits out as “tokens”, each with their own unique serial number, in addition to whatever text you can fit on the coin.

Similarly, you can put in a dollar and it will magically spit out one of a kind tickets(think skiball at Chucky Cheese). What this essentially means is, you can write I-owe-yous, contracts, issue coupons, write deeds, have election processes, all accountable because the machine knows wheither the tokens and tickets are real or not. In conclusion, you realize that this little black box can cut out a plethera of your everyday middle men. You also realize that this technology is here and it is bound to disrupt every industry.

Does this little tale seem a little tall? A little too far fetched? In the current realm of physical possiblities, it is a bit of a stretch. However we hope that by telling this story, folks will begin to see some of the real potential uses for bits in our modern times.

Moreover, we think that an immediate use for bits will fund artists, helping them to be more prolific and enable them to produce a greater amount of high quality work.

This site is a work in progress. So are some of the concepts we are trying to present. Specifically, the vision here is to incentivize monetary participation in individual recording projects. Thus making the music loving philantropist into more of an investor and producer.

The daily news on bits is too massive to keep up with. Furthermore, many of the 2.0 platforms for using and programming bits have come to fruition. Part of the learning process will be to see which ones best suite our use case.

We thank you for your time and we’ve prompted you to do even more reading and research on this fasinating, ever developing, and disruptive technology.

 

We love bits!

-Bitsburgh Cobra