Last Friday in the Ballroom, Shamoon Siddiqui, an NJIT alumni, spoke to an audience of over 50 people about Bitcoins. If you read the article about Bitcoins from one of our February issues, you would know that Bitcoins are a crypto-currency. They work like normal currencies, such as the dollar and Euro, except with greater technological innovation. Bitcoins are a currency made by nerds for all sorts of dealers.

The colloquium focused on other ideas, however. While most of it was about Bitcoins, from hashing and mining to the takedown of the online black market: Silk Road, Mr. Siddiqui hinted at a bright possibility of the use of Bitcoins.

Bitcoins is open-source. The code that makes it work is publically available on GitHub. That being said, there are other kinds of crypto-currencies like LiteCoin and PPCoin that took what Bitcoins have already done and improved on its systems.

Mr. Siddiqui stated how you can’t look at Bitcoins as a valuable new currency. Instead, he proposed how we have to look at it as a platform for creating new ways to run markets, currencies, encryption systems, and other sorts of software.

In fact, at the event, a few Bitcoin-based startups were present talking about the different kinds of software they make, services that either connect different currencies together or provide other services that center around the sharing and distribution of Bitcoins.

In the end, the possibilities of technology and currency are limitless. Tomorrow, someone might decide to make a new kind of hash tool that can not only mine Bitcoins but LiteCoins and PPCoins at the same time with the same kind of efficiency. Maybe someone already did. Regardless, new things are going to be made because crypto-currencies are new, untamed, and untapped with loads of potential.

Matthew Maravilla