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Online-Only Currency BitCoin Reaches Dollar Parity
IamTheRealMike writes "The BitCoin peer to peer currency briefly reached exchange parity with the US dollar today after a spike in demand for the coins pushed prices slightly above 1 USD:1 BTC. BitCoin was launched in early 2009, so in only two years this open source currency has gone from having no value at all to one with not only an open market of competing exchanges, but the ability to buy real goods and services like web hosting, gadgets, organic beauty products and even alpaca socks."
You'll know that this currency has achieved official status once you can start renting escort services with it.
I've sold a lot of bitcoins (in the past when the value was lower than 1/4 of it's current value) for normal money in the bank, and I have bought coffee, gadgets, a month of VPS and more for bitcoins. My main use of bitcoins now is to transfer money to a foreign account without paying outrageous fees to my bank. (The foreign account is for paying expenses in that country, not for tax evasion or anything illegal.) I buy bitcoins in my currency and sell in the other. Often with a profit as well. Can't do that with monopoly money.
It will never be worthless. The US Treasury Dept only accepts US dollars for tax payments, so we need to have dollars to pay our taxes, or we go to jail.
"The defense of freedom requires the advance of freedom" - George W Bush
Selling CPU time for money has been almost as old as computing itself, and most of the time you didn't worry about malicious code or anything silly of that nature. You certainly could build a CPU emulator (java/flash/mono) which will run executable code in a "sandbox"... and it is being done in various ways even now with virtual machines of various kinds. The Seti@Home project showed you could even queue jobs in various ways for a mass computation effort.
The only point of selling that for Bitcoins is that the Bitcoin becomes the currency instead of Dollars or Euros. There are some advantages of using Bitcoins (lower overhead for transactions and the ability to calculate micropayments in an easier fashion), but you aren't using CPU bandwidth as the currency. The whole point of the hashing algorithm which "mines" the coins is merely to introduce scarcity and to "spread the wealth" while the currency is being established.