NEW YORK – While the jury is still out on Bitcoin, with many either loving or hating it and far more not knowing what to think, experts say the digital currency's underlying technology will inevitably affect the payments business, according to an article this week on PaymentsSource.com. And, like so many trends on the horizon, the Millennial generation of consumers will be leading the way and driving adoption.

The Payments Source article delved into the cryptography aspect of Bitcoin, which was a major topic at the recent Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute's Future of Money conference. According to the article, “the spread of Bitcoin as a decentralized, distributed, peer-to-peer electronic cash system has thrust cryptography into the mainstream over the past couple years.”

Although consumers traditionally think of money as physical notes and coins, this perception is changing as more payments move online and go mobile. This shift is especially true for Millennials: 68% of this demographic said that the way they access money will be totally different in five years and 71% said the way they pay will be completely different in five years.

Emerging technologies like Apple Pay and Venmo are already helping to make money more digital and Bitcoin is on the same path, albeit somewhat further behind.

Payments Source writes that Bitcoin enthusiasts have traditionally zeroed in on the reduced cost and increased speed of transferring value over any distance, and the fraud reduction that could come from a system without the functionality for chargebacks and that logs every transaction on a public ledger called the blockchain. But as the technology came under fire and the regulatory regime tightened, this rallying cry has diffused a bit. Bitcoin debit cards, for example, are meant to be a bridge technology, but they reinsert interchange fees and misjudge the need for plastic among a consumer base that is moving to mobile. The next generation of consumers will be more likely to adopt these digital systems as their attachment to physical money dissipates.