Will digital money crowd out national currencies?

Despite a relatively short period that elapsed since the development of the blockchain or Distributed Ledger technology (DLT), it has been put to multiple uses by multinational corporations, central banks, governments and individuals. It has been responsible for the emergence of digital money and revolutionary changes in a wide array of financial services. The paper examines opportunities and threats associated with the use of the DLT, with a special emphasis on the first experimental digital money, applying a heuristic SWOT analysis. It includes the analysis of properties of the Bitcoin in comparison to traditional money together with detailed examination of protocols that created it in terms of associated dangers.