Bitcoin and the Future of Payments

It is still dependent on a network connection because that's one of the benefits. The center of the money has to have a network connection. In theory, it could be done with NFC or something like that. But that hasn't really been played with much yet. It solves the double-spend protection problem by sort of mixing the solution in with issuing the currency in the first place. When Bitcoin was new, you got 50 Bitcoins each time you came up with a block. That's now halved. It's 25 and it will halve again and again and again until it's pretty much zero.