Bitcoin Breaks Down Barriers In $60 Billion International Art Industry

The $60 billion international art world is increasingly intrigued by the idea of using bitcoin, a currency without borders and those often-annoying middleman, such as art brokers and government regulators, the BBC reports.

Eleesa Dadiani, who owns and runs an art gallery on London's famous Cork Street, is among the first to embrace the concept of cryptocurrency.

Her clientele will have the option of using bitcoin and the raft of other competitors, such as Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, Dash, Litecoin and Monero, she told the news agency.

"This is not a demand-driven decision at all, it's intuitive based on the way things are going," she said.

How It Works

The underlying tech for bitcoin is called blockchain, a digital record of transactions that is distributed and verified by a network of computers.

"Blockchain is a borderless, open source, decentralised peer-to-peer network that governments cannot shut down," Dadiani said. "For me, the blockchain is going to be the biggest thing since the Internet."

She said it's also safer, anonymous and potentially out of reach of tax collectors.

"It's really very simple," she said. "I give the client my public key (a long string of letters and numbers) and they use that to send bitcoin to my account from their digital wallet or bitcoin exchange."

"My wallet is linked to my personal bank so I can then convert those bitcoins into pounds, euros or dollars."

Not Everyone A Bitcoin Believer

The concept remains too ephemeral for some. Dennis Dick, proprietary trader at Bright Trading LLC and co-host of Benzinga’s PreMarket Prep radio show, is deterred primarily by uncertainty surrounding valuation and price targeting.

“How do I sit back and crunch numbers and come up with a fundamental value for bitcoin?” he said recently on PreMarket Prep.

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