Bitcoin may not be the messiah of a new currency its hardcore fans yearn for, but it may herald the deeper financial revolution the internet has been waiting for. While computers and smartphones have brought the web to more than a third of the world's population, online commerce still largely depends on a banking system that has changed little over recent decades, some of it relying on computer code written before the web was born. The growing interest in bitcoin, a digital currency that requires no centralized body to handle transactions, is beginning to change all that. "The rise of bitcoin has changed everyone's idea of what a good payment system should be," says Manu Sporny, CEO of web payments company Digital Bazaar, who is spearheading an effort to get the industry together to agree on standards for handling online transactions. "Bitcoin raised the bar, so everyone's got to come in and match that in some way." A key moment, Sporny and others say, will be a meeting in Paris
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