This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, February 6, 2014.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Bitcoin has already made some people wealthy, but for the rest of the world, the

cryptocurrency may open up opportunities for the poor

and oppressed to engage in business, save for the future, and help their families in other countries.

Tim Lee is a reporter at the Washington Post Wanc blog. We talked about some of those

possibilities today.

Bitcoin has opened up a lot of opportunities and when you just compare Bitcoin to say

credit cards or Western Union or some other service

that moves money around there's a lot to recommend it. Yeah I think that's right

so there's a couple of things that make it attractive one is that

the core Bitcoin system has very low fees in many cases you can send money around the

world with no fee or for a lower percentage usually than what you can with a credit card system or

Western Union. The other thing that is very attractive about it is it's a kind of a

global open protocol much like the internet's core protocols

where Bitcoin works the same anywhere in the world.

There's no, you know, if you want to get a credit card merchant account, there's all this red tape

and bureaucracy you have to go through to get a bank

to agree to let you take credit card payments. Nothing like that exists with Bitcoin. It's just a piece of

software like the internet where you just sign up and you start using it and nobody has the power to tell you how to use it or whether to use it.

So with respect to something specific like Western Union that exists, I assume all around the world, they charge quite a bit to move money.

They do, so yeah, I mean you'll see, you'll see, it depends on where you're sending it and how much and so forth but you can

...