If you ask most business owners what their Bitcoin strategy is, they will tell you, "I don't have one. I don't know what that is and I guess I don't need one." That's the same answer most folks would have given in 1993 if you asked them them, "What is your internet strategy?" By 1995, every business had such a strategy, or had come to understood that the future of their business was grim without one.

You're going to hear the Bitcoin strategy question at some time in the 2013-2014 period. Repeatedly.

That's because Bitcoin is the first decentralised, peer-to-peer currency based on open source software and cryptography -- a cryptocurrency. As such, it offers tremendous, as-yet-unrealised advantages over traditional money. Here are a few obvious ones:

• Retailers (online or bricks-and-mortar) can accept electronic payments without paying any fees to banks or credit card companies. If your business runs on a 5-10% profit margin, just do the math. Then, to your calculation that Bitcoin transactions are irreversible, meaning that once you receive a Bitcoin payment it cannot be reversed or charged back by anyone, ever.


  How does that sound?
  
  

• Your customers from other parts of the world can pay for your products and services in Bitcoin without any foreign exchange fees or spreads. 
You might want to ask your customers if savings of 5-20% on your offerings would make you a more attractive vendor.
  We think it would.

  
  

• Web hosting giant WordPress reports that there are 60 countries in the world where people are monetarily oppressed by the global banking system and, therefore, could not use Wordpress's services before the company began accepting Bitcoin. 

  Now, they all can.

  
  

• If you're a retailer selling products from Cuba such as rum or cigars and taking digital payments for them, you run a significant risk of having your entire means of accepting digital payments shut down by global payment providers enforcing US law on you, even though you are outside the United States.
  You won't have to worry about that any more.

  
  

• Many people might like to donate to your NGO, charity or other non-profit organisation, but worry that you won't spend the money the way you promise to, or that you will spend far too much on executive salaries and luxuries. With Bitcoin, it is possible to set up a completely transparent accounting system that anyone can audit. Every donation and every expenditure publicly known.
  Those folks won't worry any more.

  
  

• Do you have a business idea that requires micropayments (which are really only theoretically possible at this point), but which is completely impractical due to transaction fees?
  Your time has come.

  

But, these ground-breaking new possibilities are just the beginning of the opportunities Bitcoin is opening up for the early adopter.

Bitcoin is the only money that can actually realize such ideas as the 'information society' or 'globalised economy' in ways which both allow and depend on the free, global flow of transactions -- not subject to any particular individual or group's likes or dislikes, and without paying dead-weight fees to any middlemen.

Just as the internet and email were the future of information and personal communications back in 1990, when nobody had an internet-strategy, Bitcoin is the medium for digital financial transactions in our immediate future.

So, when someone asks you about your Bitcoin strategy and you wonder how Bitcoin can give your business advantage or turn your idea into reality, we warmly invite you to contact us.