Bitcoin may not be the messiah of a new currency its hard-core 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.