I'm curious as to why you (and other people) call Bitcoin a "currency"?
Even on the frontpage of http://bitcoin.org/en/ it's defined as an "innovative payment network and a new kind of money" and the word currency doesn't appear anywhere.
Do you also consider a cellphone to be a "phone" in the traditional sense. Could phones browse the web, edit documents, take photos, check email, etc. 20 years ago?
So what's the difference between 'money' and 'currency'? If you start thinking about what either of these words mean exactly, and then start researching it -- you'll discover that even economists aren't sure and there are several competing theories of what 'money' actually is.
'money' is the more complicated concept. If bitcoin is 'money', then whether it's 'currency' or not mostly just depends, I think, on whether you want the definition of currency to include digital certificates or only physical objects. Not a very interesting question, just a matter of definitions. Now, what 'money' is, that's an interesting question.
> So what's the difference between 'money' and 'currency'?
Uh-oh don't get us started on that one, that's a can of worms!
Used to be, way back in the past, "money" was "coin or bullion in your bank's vaults" and banks' receipts for "money" starting circulating -- hence, we have the separate word currency.
Nowadays, I suppose the distinction is largely lost, other than "currency" now implicating different jurisdictions -- EUR and USD are considered different "currencies" but both are considered "money" by and large.
Money is spent or lent or hoarded, currency circulates. One necessitates the other.
Whether "hard" or "soft", in all history and today both are certainly always "credit" -- a (rightly or wrongly) trusted claim to some future consumption of some future production. Whether the "money" is paper or metal or digital. If we swap a banana for an apple, a trade is completed and settled, no money was needed. But since most of apple sellers are not also banana buyers "right here and now", this purely mental value-association, regardless the medium it's recorded on, is needed and used and traded in-place with ease and the world mostly works! Money hence is always a debt for future trade settlement -- completion of exchange.. (Whether banks should create new money for all their lending is another question, whether all savings of people should be in ambiguous claims on future production is another question. Doesn't change this most fundamental nature of "money".)
Even on the frontpage of http://bitcoin.org/en/ it's defined as an "innovative payment network and a new kind of money" and the word currency doesn't appear anywhere.
Do you also consider a cellphone to be a "phone" in the traditional sense. Could phones browse the web, edit documents, take photos, check email, etc. 20 years ago?