Bloomberg is talking about bitcoin being more than just a currency. That bitcoin is rather more like 'The
Internet of Money'.
I think this quote is attributed to Bitcoin business angels group BitAngels - David Johnston.
It is actually a very interesting notion. While the conventional Internet is a mechanism for doing many cool things with information (content), i.e. facebook, videos, email, Skype, MMOG, et cetera, bitcoin actually supports an infrastructure which will permit one to do so many cool things with value (money). The "Internet of Money". I like that.
Obviously bitcoin is going to be insanely powerful in this regard. I just hope it doesn't take 20 years the way it took the internet that long to get to where it is now. (i.e. from 1994 / Netscape - Thanks Mark)
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-28/bitcoin-2-0-shows-technology-evolving-beyond-use-as-money.html You need to read a little between the lines with this article:
Invictus Innovations Inc., Ripple Labs Inc. and other startups are harnessing Bitcoins underlying code for such tasks as authentication, which means making sure that a buyer isnt posing as someone else, and verification of payments to ensure that a transaction is valid. If successful, the new tools could reduce the fees shouldered by buyers and sellers in the $1.22 trillion global electronic-commerce market, as well in financial services, cloud computing and other areas.
They use the word underlying several times in the article for a reason, some of these companies are taking Bitcoin's open source code and essentially replicating it for their own use. Nothing wrong with that, but they're not all using Bitcoin itself, they're using the fundamental code and adapting it to their business model (i.e. Ripple).